No Penn-Princeton on ESPNU

For the first time this decade, Penn basketball’s two meetings with Princeton will be for local eyes only.

While a national network typically carries one installment of the historic rivalry each season, this year ESPNU will televise 2009 league runner-up Harvard and Princeton during a Feb. 4 contest.

Athletic Director Steve Bilsky said that ESPNU’s decision was a result of conflicting contractual obligations rather than an indictment of the current state of one of the nation’s oldest college rivalries.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “They wanted to televise Penn-Princeton but there was a conflict on that date. It’s not a statement about the deterioration of Penn basketball.”

Bilsky said that the difficulties in scheduling the annual rivalry add to the complications.

“Due to the Princeton home schedule and our available windows, the matchup against Harvard was the best fit,” ESPN spokesman Michael Humes wrote in an e-mail.

Princeton’s agreement with ESPNU — ESPN’s college sports affiliate — guarantees that at least seven Tigers home games will be televised each year.

The network was launched in 2005, and has broadcast the Penn-Princeton basketball game every year since.

Even before ESPNU came into existence, CBS’s College Sports Network (CSTV) showed the game in 2003 and 2004.

Yet just because the nation will not see the Red and Blue take center stage this winter does not mean the century-old feud has lost its luster.

The Penn-Princeton basketball rivalry is still prime real estate when it comes to Ivy television, which has become a priority for new League executive director Robin Harris, Bilsky said.

“The two most valuable properties that the League has to offer to television, without a doubt [are] Harvard-Yale football, Penn-Princeton basketball,” Bilsky said. “You can’t even have the conversation with [national networks] Versus or YES unless they know that those things can be on the table.”

With scheduling conflicts preventing Penn-Princeton from attaining the national spotlight, Bilsky agreed that ESPNU picked the logical runner-up.

The Princeton-Harvard matchup features two teams that finished second and third in the Ivy League last season, and with defending champion Cornell losing many of its major weapons to graduation, the two are strong candidates to compete for the title this year.

Bilsky went so far as to say that he thinks that it is beneficial for the League to have more team’s drawing national attention as it makes the conference slate more exciting for fans.

“The fact that Harvard and Princeton, for the first time in 40 or 50 years, might be the most sought after game — that’s good,” Bilsky said.

But that doesn’t mean he wants the Quakers to get comfortable flying under the radar.

“I hope that our guys look at that and say, ‘to hell with that, we’ll let the Harvard-Penn game be the most sought after one.’ That’s a motivation.”

Keeping with tradition, Princeton’s showdown with with Penn at the Palestra March 8 will continue to be broadcast locally by Comcast Network.

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