Matt Conrad: Oh, to make those free throws.

About 10 minutes after Saturday's win over Harvard, with the crowd still filing out of the Palestra, a collective cheer went up from the Penn fans walking past the tennis courts. The news quickly spread through the crowd - Cornell had beaten Yale, 60-59, returning the Quakers to their rightful spot atop the Ivy standings.

What most of those people would not learn until later, if at all, was how that game ended.

Yale's Casey Hughes, who scores 10 points per game, had two free throws with two seconds to play. Making both would have almost assured an Elis win. Neither fell.

Yale learned a valuable lesson the Quakers are all too familiar with: Free-throw shooting can make or break a game - and more often, it will break it.

It is a lesson that Penn has learned the tough way not just this season, but over the past few. I cannot remember a time since I have been here when any free throw in a close game did not involve holding your breath and praying.

Just take a look at Penn's schedule this season, and it is obvious how foul shooting has affected the Quakers' record. That three-point loss against UTEP to open the year? Add in those six missed free throws, and it is a three-point win. That comeback at Seton Hall that fell short by nine? Those 10 points left at the line would have meant a one-point win. And still fresh in fans' minds is how the Quakers' 77-68 loss to Yale included 8-for-21 foul shooting.

In fact, if you add every missed free throw to the Quakers' score, Penn's record goes from 14-8 (5-1 Ivy) to 17-4-1 (6-0). Admittedly, expecting to make every shot is a ridiculous assumption. But even adding in half of the misses gets Penn that Ivy win and wipes away another loss.

And it goes both ways. Do not forget that emotional win over Fran Dunphy's Temple team. With 1.4 seconds left, Mark Zoller did what Hughes could not, and sank three shots for a 76-74 win.

It is pretty easy to see how the team's fortunes rise and fall with free-throw percentage. Through 22 games, 10 of the best 12 foul-shooting percentages have occurred in wins. Of the bottom six, four have been losses.

Games with a free-throw percentage of .750 or greater end in a 16-point differential in Penn's favor. Between .600 and .750, it drops to 7.5. And at .600 or below, the result is on average a 6.5-point loss.

Of course, these numbers are not the only factor in whether a game is a win or a loss. Clearly, if the team were to have made all of those throws, other problems in those losses would not have magically gone away.

However, it is frustrating to the fans and, I am sure, to the players as well, when one of the few aspects of the game that they have full control over is not going as well as it objectively should.

A hot-shooting squad can be dealt with by a strong defense. Great rebounding can prevent even the best offense from seeing the ball as much as they would like. But free throws rest solely on whichever player is at the line. Because of this, it is the one area in which there is not really an excuse to be struggling.

I don't profess to be an expert on free-throw shooting - I am not the one there on the line with thousands of people staring at me. But with the amount of impact that those few points can make on the final score - and ultimately in the final standings - I would like to think that it is a high priority at practice right now.

Because two missed free throws have the potential to sink an entire season. Just ask Casey Hughes.

Matt Conrad is a senior physics major from Manalapan, N.J., and is former Senior Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is mlconrad@sas.upenn.edu.

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