When the smoke cleared last weekend in Ivy League men's basketball, a scoring record had been set, a double-overtime thriller had shuffled the standings and the preseason pick to win the championship had lost two more games to unimpressive teams.
Brown senior Jason Forte has had the best moves in the Ivies for years and usually has little problem putting up big numbers in league games. But Forte had his biggest night yet against Cornell on Friday. He scored a career-high 36 points, the best scoring performance in Cornell's Newman Arena, which has hosted nearly 300 basketball games since its opening.
The guard, who Penn coach Fran Dunphy calls "the hardest player to guard in the Ivy League," also finished with six assists and five rebounds. However, Forte's effort was not enough to stop Cornell, which won the game, 76-75, on a pair of Cody Toppert free throws with 3.5 seconds remaining.
The Big Red won both its weekend games, moving it into second place with a 4-2 league record. After beating Brown, Cornell won a double-overtime marathon against Yale that featured 11 ties and 10 lead-changes in the second half.
Cornell junior Lenny Collins scored 11 points in the overtime sessions and 41 points on the weekend, good enough to get Ivy League co-Player of the Week honors with Forte. The Cornell win overshadowed a 25-point effort by Yale leader Edwin Draughan, who kept his team in the game on multiple occasions.
As in football earlier in the school year, the Big Red is turning heads with its improved quality of league play this basketball season. If teams like Princeton and Columbia continue to disappoint, Cornell may not drop from its current second-place position this season.
Both the Lions and the Tigers were shut out last weekend, with Columbia losing to Brown and Yale and Princeton losing to Harvard and Dartmouth. The Lions fell victim to noteworthy performances by two of the League's top stars in Forte and Draughan, while the Tigers dropped two games to mediocre teams they should have easily defeated.
On Friday, Princeton scored only one point in the final 4:30, allowing Dartmouth to go on an 18-1 run to win the game soundly, 50-42. The Tigers only got 11 shots off in the second half -- making four of them -- and committed a few key turnovers in the final minutes to seal their fate. Preseason polls saw the Big Green as the worst in the Ivy League this season, but the win over the Tigers was a major step for a rebuilding program.
The game against Harvard was closer, but Princeton once again fell victim to a late-game run by the opposition and could not muster up one of its own. Though Tigers center Judson Wallace came to play and scored 23 points, he was not able to stop his Crimson counterpart Brian Cusworth, who scored seven points late in the second half to put Harvard on top for good, 61-57.
Such late-game combustions foreshadowed Princeton's folding to Penn Tuesday night. The Quakers went on a historic 21-3 run to end the second half and took hold of the game in overtime, winning 70-62.
Last weekend's Ivy games jumbled up the standings, further puzzling analysts who named Princeton to finish as league champions, Penn to rebuild, Yale to be competitive and Columbia to turn some heads. The season is still far from over, but it will most likely end just as surprising as it has begun.
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