Ivy men's hoops awash in parity

A rising tide lifts all ships, so the saying goes.

This season, men's basketball better hope it's true.

Last year, the Tigers were not a great team. Most people know the story. The Tigers lost their coach, their star center, their young sharpshooter, and just about everyone else who had any sort of playing experience or scoring ability. It looked as if it would be Nate Walton versus the rest of the Ivy League.

Princeton's weakness was supposed to bring an end to the Penn-Princeton joint-ownership of the league. While Penn was stacked and primed to repeat as champs, most of the media thought, quite logically, that Princeton was headed for third place behind Brown. It looked like the year things were going to get shook up in the Ancient Eight.

And shake up they did — more than anyone expected. First off, it was not just a two-horse, Tiger-Quaker race for the title. Neither Princeton nor Penn ran over the rest of the league, as they have been accustomed to doing in the past few years. Penn played uninspired basketball all season, losing its first eight games and finishing tied with Brown. Princeton lost to Dartmouth, Cornell, and Columbia. It took a buzzer-beater three pointer for the Tigers to top Harvard, and a last-second block to secure victory against Brown at home.

Despite their struggles, somehow Nate and the Miracles won the Ivy League. But the fact remains that the Tigers were not that good. Considering the team's personnel losses, it was a great season. However, they won the title in a league having a bad year — and got destroyed by a mediocre North Carolina team in the NCAA Tournament.

This year is looking to be an entirely different yet eerily similiar story. Like Penn the year before, Princeton returns all the key players from last year's league champs. The media, once again quite logically, picked Penn to finish third.

Just like the 2000 Quakers, the Tigers struggled a bit out of the gate, losing their first three games before handling intrastate foe Rider at home last night. Princeton performed well against No. 9 St. Joseph's, and Maryland and Kansas should let the Tigers know exactly where they stand.

And so far, the Quakers have made us look silly. In their first game, they handled the ACC's Georgia Tech, 79-74, becoming only the sixth team in 20 years to beat the Yellowjackets at Alexander Memorial Coliseum. Forward Ugonna Onyekwe, who struggled mightily for the Quakers last season, poured in 30 points.

Then Penn really got scary. On Thanksgiving Day, the Quakers had an 11-point halftime lead on No. 2 Illinois. It took a 71 percent second-half shooting percentage for the Illini to retake the lead, and still Penn was down only two points with four minutes remaining. Had junior forwards Andrew Toole and Koko Archibong not been in serious foul trouble those last four minutes, Penn might have pulled it off. Onyekwe dominated, leading all scorers with 28.

Onyekwe continued his tear in the next two games, as Penn beat Eastern Illinois, 77-60, and the defending Big 12 champion Iowa State. Onyekwe averaged 24 points per game and shot 61 percent from the floor.

Penn isn't the only vastly-improved team in the Ivies this year. Brown's Earl Hunt, who just missed becoming the first player to score 1,000 points before the end of his sophomore season, is averaging 24.3 points per game so far this season. He's backed up by Alai Nuualiita, who has two double-doubles so far this season, and freshman Jason Forte, the little brother of the Boston Celtics' Joseph Forte. Columbia's Craig Austin, a first team All-Ivy selection last year, is supported by junior center Chris Wiedemann, who has hit 50 of 70 shots in his last 13 games. Even Yale, supposedly in a "rebuilding" year, hung 102 points on George Washington.

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Early on, it seems to be a different, and vastly improved, Ivy League. The tide has come in, and parity has apparently come to the Ivy League. The Tigers better be ready.

This seems to be happening everywhere in the college basketball world. In the first two weeks of the season, half the preseason top 10 lost. Maryland, St. Joseph's, and Florida all fell. Hampton smacked North Carolina. Western Kentucky whomped Kentucky, Ball State ran through Kansas and UCLA before giving the NCAA's 800-pound gorilla Duke a slight scare.

Don't get me wrong — in a seven-game series, Kentucky and Kansas handle Western Kentucky and Ball State every time. But it seems more than ever that, aside from the Blue Devils, anybody can beat anybody in Division I basketball this season.

The thing to remember is that this phenomenon happened last year in the Ivy League. Until last season, no Ivy school had swept Penn and Princeton in a weekend since before Vanilla Ice was cool. Columbia took care of that.

And no one had challenged Penn and Princeton for the Ivy title since the Bangles were cool. Now, the Quakers are apparently back from their season-long nap, and they've brought friends.

So even with all of its key ingredients returning and a few more added to the mix, Princeton is no lock for the title. The tide has come in, and it seems the rest of the league's ships have been lifted. If they want to cut down the nets again, the Tigers had better go with them.