Men's Hoops opens with Penn State

The preseason buildup to the Penn men's basketball season is all about numbers.

Tantalizing the media and Penn fans alike have been these numerical doozies:

Five -- Penn starters returning.

Three -- Penn All-Ivy first-teamers returning (Andrew Toole, Koko Archibong and Ugonna Onyekwe).

One -- Penn's preseason rank in the Ancient Eight.

For the Penn team itself, the most important number has been six -- the length, in weeks, of Penn's preseason practice schedule.

Tomorrow night, all those numbers go out the window.

Penn (25-7 overall, 11-3 Ivy League in 2001-02) and Penn State (7-21, 3-13 Big Ten) will tip off at 7 p.m. in the Quakers' season opener at the Palestra.

"I'm just really excited to get out on the floor and play at the Palestra again," said Toole, Penn's starting point guard. "We've been going at one another for six weeks.

"It's finally going to be nice when we get the chance to beat up on somebody else other than ourselves."

In their season opener, the Nittany Lions (0-1) endured a rather substantial beating, losing to North Carolina, 85-55.

In that contest -- a first-round preseason NIT matchup at the Smith Center in Chapel Hill, N.C. -- Penn State shot 21 for 71 as a team, including a disastrous 3 for 23 from behind the arc.

But the Quakers will not be banking on a similar effort on Saturday night from their in-state rivals.

"They were embarrassed by North Carolina and they're a much better team than that," Toole said.

The Lions are led by a pair of feisty guards in Brandon Watkins and Sharif Chambliss.

Watkins (13.6 ppg in 2001-2002) got his senior year off to a hot start in the loss to UNC, dropping a career-high 24 points on Matt Dougherty's bunch. He was Penn State's top shooter that game, connecting on 11 of 22 shots.

Chambliss -- Penn State's leading scorer (14.6 ppg) and the leader in the Big Ten in three-pointers made per game last year -- did not enjoy the same success in his season debut.

On Monday night in Chapel Hill, Chambliss was a chief contributor to the Lions' woes, shooting an abysmal 2 for 11 from three-point range.

Penn does not believe a repeat performance is likely.

"I think their perimeter guys are pretty good," Penn coach Fran Dunphy said. "Watkins is as fast a guy as we're going to play all year.

"While Chambliss didn't have a great shooting night [against UNC], he is absolutely capable of having a big night against us."

The Quakers, though, have a pretty solid offense of their own. Balance is the key to the Penn attack, as four of the Quakers' five starters -- Onyekwe (17.5 ppg), Archibong (14.2 ppg), Toole (13.9 ppg) and Jeff Schiffner (10.0 ppg) -- averaged in double figures last season.

And just like last year, when the Quakers fired 668 threes -- at a nearly 40 percent clip -- Penn figures to be a team which relies heavily on the three-pointer once again.

Still, the Quakers recognize they will be hard-pressed to get their three-point shot attempts off tomorrow night against an active Penn State backcourt.

"Their perimeter guys are quicker than our guys," Dunphy said."So we're just going to have to figure out a way to get our shots off."

Game specifics aside, the Quakers are itching to get back on the court. It has been 253 days since Penn last played -- an NCAA first round loss to California.

And the Quakers know that there would be no better way to start the new season than with a rousing victory over Penn State.

"I'm definitely looking forward to tomorrow night," Toole said. "Hopefully, we'll have a good ball game and a happy ending."

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