ESPN Men's Basketball

PHILADELPHIA -- The Ivy League proudly refers to itself as the Ancient Eight, comfortable in its status as a relic and an antique in an age when newer is always equal to better.

This is a place where things are done a certain way because they’ve always been done a certain way. Change is welcome, but only when it is incorporated into the honored traditions of the past.

So while the rest of the country stages its conference showcases, bringing the early madness to March with Champ Week, the Ivy League doles out its automatic bid to the NCAA tournament the old-fashioned way: to the regular-season winner.

And when there is a tie, the old league reverts to the age-old rules of the playground: one game, winner take all.

It is archaic, perhaps, but is it really so wrong?

When there is only the hope of one bid -- and the Ivy has never received an at-large -- is it more fair to let the team that grinds it out over 14 games represent your league or the Johnny-come-lately who gets hot or catches lightning in a bottle for 72 hours?

“I think it’s a good way to do it,’’ Princeton coach Sydney Johnson said. “That’s the way it was when I played and that’s the way it was before and I appreciate that. I think it’s the right way to go about it.’’

Johnson, some would argue, could afford to be gracious. Thanks to a 70-58 win over rival Penn on Tuesday night, his Tigers now have a 50/50 chance of winning that single ticket.

Princeton will face Harvard at 4 p.m. ET on Saturday in a one-game playoff to decide who is in the NCAA tournament and who is not.

But those reared in the world of the Ivy League understand that this is how it works and appreciate that this is probably how it ought to work.

“Is the glass half full or half empty?” Penn coach Jerome Allen said. “If I’m in first place, I feel pretty good about it, but sitting here like we are, I’d love the chance to keep on playing. But that’s the law of the land. We had an opportunity to extend our season. We had 14 chances and it didn’t happen.’’

On Saturday, most of the talk will center around Harvard. Until it beat Princeton on Saturday, the Crimson had never won even a piece of an Ivy League championship. The school's one and only NCAA tournament appearance came in 1946.

Hey, the school has only been around for 375 years.

Yet Princeton’s share of the title and chance to play for a March bid is every bit as newsworthy. Occasional fans consider the Tigers the elitist league’s elite, but in reality, it has been Princeton which has fallen back among the pack in recent years.

It’s been six years since the Tigers won a share of the crown, which on the scale of Harvard isn’t much but to Princeton fans is an eternity.

The drought chased out one of its own. Former player Joe Scott left as the Tigers head coach for Denver before the posse could catch him.

As the university so often does, it turned to one of its own to replace him, handing the keys over to Johnson.

In his first year, he went 6-23.

“It was pretty lonely,’’ he said. “It was very different than what people were accustomed to at Princeton.’’

Different, too, than what Johnson was accustomed to. He won two Ivy titles as a player, going 14-0 in his senior season.

He has drawn on his own experiences and his own sense of pride to push his players, sometimes coaxing them and sometimes shaming them. On Saturday, when Harvard beat the Tigers to win a part of the Ivy crown, Johnson made his players stay on the court and endure the court storming.

He wanted them to understand what it feels like when you don’t give your all, when you are outhustled and outworked as he thought his Tigers were on Saturday.

“It was painful, real painful,’’ senior Dan Mavraides said. “I hope they didn’t have a camera on me because I got pretty emotional.’’

Johnson went back to that well against Penn. The Tigers led the game 15-4 and then trailed 23-19 at the half. Just under a minute in, the Quakers extended that to 27-19.

Johnson called timeout. He huddled privately with his coaches and when one of them, former player Brian Earl, told him "they just aren’t playing hard enough," Johnson delivered that message to the team.

At first it was patient and then it was straight firebrand, an insistence that the Tigers were simply being too passive, that they weren’t playing hard enough.

In the 15 minutes prior to Johnson’s critical timeout, the Tigers scored four points.

In the 15 minutes after, they scored 37.

Senior Kareem Maddox internalized the message the best. He had two points at halftime and 23 by game’s end. His post dominance forced Penn to sag inside, and once the defense committed, the deft passer found his shooters outside.

The Tigers hit an astounding 14 of their 18 field goals in the second half.

“Several people talked to me at halftime and told me I wasn’t being as aggressive as I normally was,’’ Maddox said. “I didn’t really realize it.’’

And now the challenge is to find the intensity for one more game.

Johnson played in a playoff game in his own career. In 1996, the Tigers beat Penn 63-56 in overtime.

They would go on to beat UCLA in the first round of the NCAA tournament in what would be Pete Carril’s last year.

“To be the coach here, it’s a huge responsibility,’’ Johnson said. “It’s not just a job when you’re coaching your alma mater. In some cases, it’s where you met your wife like I did. It’s about your best friends and you put a lot of love into it. It’s a real challenge, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.’’

Johnson knows the history.

He’s lived the history.

And he appreciates the history.

Before they smelled the rarefied air of big-time success, Ed Rendell and David Montgomery would come to the Palestra, grab their chairback seats and watch what winning was all about.

This was when Rendell was the newly elected mayor of Philadelphia, not the Pennsylvania governor, and Montgomery was the co-owner of the oft-ridiculed Phillies, not the four-time National League East winners and 2008 World Series champs.

The winning was on the court, where Jerome Allen and the Penn Quakers racked up three consecutive perfect Ivy League seasons and a 73-14 record from 1993 to 1995. Allen would twice be named Ivy League Player of the Year as the Quakers wrested control of the Ancient Eight from their rivals up the interstate in Princeton.

That was then.

This is now.

Now Penn is coming off three disastrous seasons in the four years since Fran Dunphy skipped across town to Temple. The Quakers have won just 29 games (losing 58) and worse, ceded control of the Ivy League to Cornell.

Into that doom and gloom walks Allen, the beloved superstar brought in to save the sinking ship.

If only it were Hollywood.

The fact is, Allen -- named permanent coach in late March -- has a boatload of work to do. The Quakers limped to an 0-7 start last season, a disastrous out-of-the-gate run that cost Glen Miller his job. Allen came in as interim coach and coaxed Penn to a 6-15 finish, the highlight a stunning win against Cornell. Nevertheless, the six total victories were the fewest by a Penn team since 1957.

There is hope this season, however. Last season’s young Quakers equate to experienced players this season, and Penn will welcome its entire starting lineup back.

Junior Zack Rosen led the league in scoring last season (17.7 ppg) and senior Jack Eggleston (13.4 ppg, 6.4 rpg) was a second-team All-Ivy performer. Tyler Bernardini, the one-time Ivy rookie of the year, returns after missing all but two games last year with a broken leg. In 2008-09, he was an All-Ivy performer and averaged 13.7 points and four boards a game.

“We have a lot of work ahead of us,’’ Allen said. “It’s a process, but I also know with the right players, the right system, we can get things done here. Hard work pays off, I always tell them that. Right now, they need some winning experiences to believe that, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s a long tunnel and I wear glasses.’’

Allen was hired for who he is as much as Miller was fired for who he was not. The Quakers’ on-court woes certainly dimmed Miller’s chance at longevity, but it was an inability to connect with the alums that doomed him to the ignominious December dismissal.

That athletic director Steve Bilsky tabbed Allen, whose previous coaching experience consisted of player-coach for two years with a pro team in Italy, says all you need to know about what needs to be done to revitalize the Quakers.

“He’s a very savvy guy,’’ said Dunphy, who went back to the word ‘savvy’ repeatedly when defining Allen. “He understands the task at hand and understands how great the challenge is, but he’s also very smart politically. He knows what bases to touch. He’s just way ahead in the game that way.’’

To fans and alumni, Allen represents the glorious and immediate past, the heydays when the Quakers ran away with the Ivy League and then gave the big boys a scare in the NCAA tournament.

It is not just the fans and alums that remember. Allen does, too. Every coach is invested in winning. His very livelihood demands it. But as a graduate who experienced all that the Quakers could be, Allen is even more anxious to restore order.

“I’m from Philly. I grew up watching the Big 5 and I went to Penn, so this is everything a little boy could dream of,’’ Allen said. “Some of the same professors I had are still here. People who’ve had season tickets since before I’ve been born are all here. All of that comes into play. But I don’t look at it as added pressure. The standards to me are a sense of normalcy. It’s what people expect. It’s what I expect.’’

As do those two famous gentlemen in the seats.

Friday night usually only matters twice a year in college basketball:

1) The first weekend of the season, when schools are generally trying to avoid Saturday conflicts with football.

2) The postseason, when conference and NCAA tournament games are being played.

Not so this year. We have just completed the freakiest February Friday ever, with notable upsets in triplicate. It demands some attention and analysis, and perhaps some smelling salts.

We had a Friday in which a 3-15 team (Penn) laid a 15-point smackdown on a ranked 20-3 team (Cornell) that was favored by 17 points. That’s certainly the biggest league upset of the year nationwide. Might be the biggest upset, period.

We had a Friday in which a struggling team in the lower half of the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference (Niagara) rose up and took down the 14-0 big dog of the league (Siena) by 13 points. That reverses an 18-point loss last month.

And to top it off, we had two ranked rivals from the Big East exchanging huge shots and huge mistakes through three dramatic overtimes (Pittsburgh 98, West Virginia 95).

Earlier this week, I wrote about the eight teams trying to get through conference play unbeaten. That number already is down to six after the losses by the Big Red and the Saints – teams I thought were among the most likely to run the league table.

The upsets derailed the considerable momentum of both Cornell (eight-game winning streak shot) and Siena (15-game winning streak, longest in the nation, done). It also cast doubt upon both the Big Red and the Saints as potential NCAA at-large teams. Neither team has a victory over an RPI top-50 opponent and now each has a fresh loss that will hurt their own RPI numbers.

Both can still earn automatic bids, of course – Siena by winning the MAAC tourney at home and Cornell by winning the Ivy regular season. But the Saints, who struggled to beat Fairfield at home earlier this week, might now seem mortal to their league brethren. And the Big Red now sits in second place in the Ivy behind 5-0 Princeton – though the two still meet twice.

But instead of solely examining the damage to the losers, we should take a moment to appreciate what the winners did.

Penn threw a 15-0 haymaker at Cornell to open the second half and pull away. Niagara put a 24-3 run on Siena during a five-minute stretch of the second half to do the same.

At Penn, school president Amy Gutmann went into the postgame locker room to congratulate the team. This might have been the victory that gives interim coach and former Quaker hero Jerome Allen a solid chance at the job on a full-time basis.

Allen was elevated from assistant when the school surprisingly fired Glen Miller after a 0-7 start. The record got to 0-10 before the Quakers finally got in the win column – but now they’ve won three of their last four, including this absolute stunner, rallying around a guy who had zero coaching experience before joining the staff in September.

Allen and his staff had a smart, slow-the-tempo plan that included doubling Cornell star center Jeff Foote every time he caught the ball.

“This was a 54-possession game,” Penn assistant John Gallagher said. “For us to win any game, it’s got to be played between 54 and 65 possessions. Anything over that, we will not win. We ended up controlling tempo.”

They also ended up shooting the lights out. A team that entered the game shooting 39 percent from the field, 29 percent from 3-point range and 74 percent from the foul line went 56 percent, 52 percent and 82 percent, respectively.

Among the heroes for the Quakers was guard Zack Rosen, who had 22 points, five assists and three steals. The previous two games, Penn’s leading scorer had two assists and 13 turnovers. This bounce-back performance illustrated the sophomore’s character.

“He’s a great leader,” Allen said. “He wins every sprint. Whatever you ask him to do, he does it. I think every coach in America would love to have a guy like that on their team.”

Problem is, there is literally no time to celebrate in the Ivy League. Teams play back-to-back games on Friday and Saturday, and the Quakers went quickly Friday night into a meeting to preview their game against Columbia.

“I told them, ‘You guys got about 30 minutes to enjoy the victory,’ “ Allen said. “I really wanted them to stay in the moment, because it is a big deal. But my job doesn’t allow that.”

Niagara at least has a day between games to savor beating Siena. The two have had a lively rivalry in recent years as the premier programs in the MAAC, but the Purple Eagles have dipped below .500 in league play this season and were no match for the Saints on the road last month.

But Joe Mihalich’s team rose to the occasion at home, in a game I targeted Tuesday as Siena’s biggest threat to running the MAAC table.

For a long time, it looked as if the upsets in the Ivy and the MAAC were the dominant Friday storylines. Then Pitt and West Virginia played a game that conjured memories of the Syracuse-Connecticut six-OT game from last year’s Big East tournament.

Neither team gave up – which was wise, because neither team would shut the door on the other.

Pitt was down seven points with 45 seconds left in regulation, but WVU all but quit playing and allowed the Panthers to hit enough shots to force overtime. Then Pitt gave Truck Bryant an open 3 in the final three seconds of the first overtime while up three. (Choosing not to foul in those situations never fails to amaze.) And the Panthers compounded that in the second OT by fouling Da’Sean Butler on a 3 while leading by three in the final 25 seconds.

That’s how you get to triple OT. Once there, Pitt finally stopped the madness – though not before giving West Virginia another shot at a tying 3 in the final seconds. But the fatigued basketball gods spoke: “No, send that shot off the rim and let’s save a little something for Saturday.”

A day that has a hard act to follow.