Matt Conrad: Loss isn't 'good,' but it's not all bad either

After the Quakers' loss to Yale on Saturday, coach Glen Miller wasn't happy.

And with good reason - his team had just dropped a game in New Haven for the third time in four years, missed well over half of its free throws, and fallen in the standings behind a team that entered Ivy play with a 4-9 record.

But at the post-game press conference, Miller said one tthing that struck me: "This is good for us."

A loss to Yale is good for us?

"This is good for us - to see what we're made of," said Miller. "It's good for us to get our tails handed to us. We'll wake up, we'll be a lot more aggressive, and play with more of a sense urgency next weekend."

It would be easy to view his statement as nonsense - to dismiss it as just the result of a shocked, angry coach looking for some silver lining in an otherwise dismal night. And from the way Miller looked while saying this, I wonder whether he believed it himself.

But maybe there is something to it.

The Quakers were all but crowned the Ivy champions months ago by everyone - the media, Penn fans, others' fans.

However, as sports has shown countless times, a humiliating downfall often follows excessive hubris.

If Miller is right, this hit to the Quakers' collective ego will result in much more urgency in each remaining game.

The players do seem to be reflecting that sentiment. "We're in a dog race now," senior forward Mark Zoller said. "We've got to take each game, prepare for each game like it's our last."

Senior guard Ibrahim Jaaber echoed this feeling. "We still believe that we're capable of winning the Ivy League championship, and it's going to take hard work to prove it and get it done. . We have to do everything possible."

The fact that they weren't previously looking at each game like that is the problem. In the 14-game tournament that is the Ivy League season, each loss can be devastating.

But this Quakers team has already demonstrated that they have the ability to draw motivation from adversity. When Penn lost to Saint Joseph's last week, Jaaber said that they would use the defeat as fuel in the next game, at Brown. That they did, playing some of their best basketball of the season on Friday.

As they often are, those lessons were forgotten on Saturday, but with that "1" in the conference loss column now, this motivation might not be so easily lost.

There's still plenty of time left in the season, and the Quakers are by no means in terrible shape. Yale heads to New York next weekend for two tough games at Cornell and Columbia, and also still has a trip to the Palestra to look ahead to.

As long as the Quakers can avoid another stumble like this one, they should be fine. And if this one loss prevents more down the line, maybe it was worth it. Getting their comeuppance in early February is far less damaging than if it was in early March, with a league title directly on the line.

I can't accept that this loss is a "good thing," and I still don't think that Miller really does either. But if the result is a stronger, more focused Quakers team, at the very least it might not be as bad of a thing as it looked like on Saturday.

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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