Ten months ago, things were looking up for Brown basketball fans. And then John Chaney got involved.
The Bears ended their 6-8 Ivy campaign on a high note, decisively beating Princeton and taking eventual league champion Penn to overtime.
And with all five starters returning, led by standout junior forward Keenan Jeppesen (11.1 ppg, 5.0 rpg in 2005-06) and coach Glen Miller, fans were expecting big things in 2006-07. For years, Brown had appeared to be the next squad to try to crash the Penn-Princeton hegemony, and Miller's first sub-.500 season since joining Brown in 1998-99 looked like just a bump in the road on the way to a possible title run.
Then John Chaney retired.
The longtime Temple coach's resignation set into motion a chain of events that would end with Miller as Fran Dunphy's replacement at Penn, Jeppesen leaving the team after a failed bid to transfer to the Quakers, and Brown sitting at 5-10 heading into Ivy play.
After losing his star player, first-year coach Craig Robinson said that he would "have to teach [the team] how to play better and win games" without Jeppesen.
So far, it appears that he has had mixed success.
Robinson still has a solid group of players after the December departures of Jeppesen and junior center Mark MacDonald for personal reasons.
Junior guard Mark McAndrew had filled in for Jeppesen nicely, averaging 13.1 points and 5.1 rebounds per game, and was named the Ivy League Player of the Week for the first week of January. Junior guard Damon Huffman, recently returned after a medial collateral ligament tear in the first game of the season, is contributing 14.1 points per game, and senior Marcus Becker's 2.4 steals per game ranks 29th in the nation, and only behind Penn's Ibrahim Jaaber in the Ivy League.
But the games just haven't been falling the Bears' way.
They opened up the season with three consecutive losses, and five in their first six games. Later losses included an embarrassing 49-47 loss to 2-11 UC-Davis and a demoralizing 60-56 overtime defeat to Southern Methodist just four days later.
And most of the Bears' wins have been against less-than-quality opponents: Western Illinois is currently 6-12, Wagner is 4-10, Quinnipiac is 5-9. At 8-6, Hartford is one of only two teams Brown has defeated that is over .500.
However, one of the Bears' wins was an impressive one. Early in the season, Brown pulled off a surprising 51-41 upset over local rival Providence, which currently sits at 14-3 and second place in the Big East.
While Jeppesen and McAndrew contributed nearly half of the Bears' points that game, this win could still serve as notice to other Ivy teams that, on any given night, the Bears could surprise them.
It happened to Penn last season - a last-second block and subsequent three-pointer by Marcus Becker sent the game to overtime, where the Quakers managed to eke out a six-point victory in what should have been an easy win.
And with the way Brown's upcoming schedule looks, it could happen to Penn again.
The Bears kick off the Ivy season with three of their first four games against Yale and Harvard - most likely the two teams Brown will be the favorite against.
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