Matt Conrad: Balance in Ivies can be restored

Much has been said about the close of this past basketball season being the "end of an era" for Penn hoops.

That may be true, but it may turn out to be something equally important: the beginning of another era for Ivy League basketball - one filled with greater balance and parity.

As much as I have loved seeing the Quakers win three titles in my four years here, the lack of meaningful competition is pushing the conference towards irrelevance.

Fans around the league are getting bored, and people from outside the conference just can't be bothered to care when the same two teams - Penn and Princeton - win every year.

But with the loss of the three seniors who have anchored this team for the better part of four years, there's no longer any clearly dominant team in the conference.

Penn will certainly be a contender next year. And if Princeton finds a coach who can pull the program out of its current funk, the Tigers can never be counted out.

And with Yale, Cornell and Columbia all returning with young, promising talent and some very solid veterans, 2007-08 has the potential to see the most parity the Ivy League has experienced in quite a few years.

While a more competitive league may not be great news for Penn fans who want to extend the Quakers' run of titles, it could be fantastic for the conference.

The competitive imbalance in the Ivy League has long since reached epidemic proportions - next season will mark the 20th anniversary of the last time neither Penn nor Princeton won the conference championship. A league with such a disparity has a hard time being taken seriously by the larger college-basketball community.

I've previously argued that a postseason conference tournament is not the answer to this problem. But neither is the status quo. If Ivy League basketball is to regain meaning again, it must be through increased competition and parity - which finally is on the horizon.

If the league can put together a string of years with more than two teams vying for the title, it would help recruiting and visibility around the league's basketball offices. And it would be done without sacrificing the legitimacy of the competition, as would be the case with a conference tournament.

From the perspective of the Ivy League's viability, the ideal scenario that could come out of the upcoming season would be an exciting, tight race that a non-'P' team wins. The recruiting presence improves among all of the newly contending programs, and three or four years from now, Penn is back on top - but with a dramatically improved group of teams.

Of course, this would require certain programs to take advantage of the opportunity, something that some Ivy teams haven't exactly made good about (I'm looking at you, Harvard).

So just how likely the true parity that the league needs may remain shrouded in uncertainty.

But with any luck, the conclusion of this season won't be remembered as the end of a golden age for Penn, but as the beginning of a golden age for the Ivy League.

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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