Sacrificing hoops for the greater good

So, you guys are probably gonna beat us tonight.

We're 1-5 in the Ivies. We lost to Dartmouth Saturday night. Yeah, that Dartmouth.

But it's not like we couldn't beat you guys if we wanted to. We've done it in the past, time and time again. But this season, we're looking at the bigger picture.

Our athletics department did some talking with world-famous Princeton economist Paul Krugman, and we decided it would be more efficient to allocate our scarce athletic resources differently. We can't all admit 10,000 kids.

Lately, rather than devoting everything we've got to keeping ahead of Penn in men's hoops, we've been spreading the sports love. If you haven't noticed, we've won the Ivy League all-sports title for the past 20 consecutive years. In 2006, we won it by the greatest margin ever.

Unfortunately, our continued overall athletic dominance has come at the expense of our once glorious basketball squad. What we realized is that an Ivy League title in hoops was sort of meaningless at this point on the national stage (hope you enjoyed the No. 15 seed last year, guys).

Now, athletes who we might once have forced onto the hardwood are being shipped off to lower-profile sports where the whole no-scholarships thing doesn't cramp our style so much.

Wondering why we started a six-foot, four-inch walk-on at center for much of this season? That would be because the man who was supposed to be patrolling the paint for us on the hardwood is instead throwing it down on the volleyball court. At 6'9", sophomore middle blocker Mike Vincent led Princeton past No. 15 St. Francis on Saturday with 12 kills.

"Wait, volleyball? What's that? We don't even have a volleyball team," a confused Quaker mascot said.

Meanwhile, the Princeton basketball team has been giving almost 39 minutes of court time per game to a freshman point guard, as the University's best passer relaxes after tearing up the gridiron this fall. Senior quarterback Jeff Terrell won the Bushnell Cup as the Ivy League's player of the year, compiling one of the best statistical performances in conference history in the process. With Terrell coolly running the show, Princeton marched to an Ivy championship, posterizing the Penn defense along the way with a game-winning play that topped SportsCenter's Top 10.

And before you make fun of Princeton because all four of our dunks this season have been slammed home by the same player (junior forward Noah Savage), consider the fact that our most explosive leapers are currently tearing up the Ivy track circuit. Freshman Justin Frick and junior Alex Willis each have out-jumped the 6'10" bar this season, giving them five more inches of vertical than any Penn jumper. As long as we're doing that, you guys can clap the backboard on layups as much as you want.

Even if all else were equal, how can you expect any self-respecting road basketball team to play well in a venue called "The Palestra"? It sounds like a venereal disease. The kind of malady that leaves you with an ibby jaaber.

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Jadwin Gym, meanwhile, is so nice that Bill Cowher retired as the head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers just to come watch games there on the weekends. We're not even kidding. While you all are spilling your Quaker Oats over a meaningless Penn-Princeton game in Philly, the future NFL Hall-of-Famer knows that a truly classy night of basketball can only be had in central Jersey, where he will watch his daughter Meagan demolish your middling women's hoops squad in March.

Just feel lucky that Title IX is keeping us from unleashing her on Mark Zoller in the low post.