Take a closer look at the eight wins which Harvard's basketball team managed to rack up this year, and you'll find that the season was every bit as bad as a .308 winning percentage suggests.

Couple that with the fact that the Crimson roundballers were equally adept at losing to horrible teams and good teams, and Harvard's recent season comes into focus as one of the worst in the last few decades.

First, to recap: The Crimson victories can be listed in a very small amount of space. Brandeis, Rochester, Brown, B.C., B.U., Yale, Cornell, and Columbia. But that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Judging the Judges

Judging by records alone, Brandeis was the best team Harvard managed to beat this year, sporting a 10-14 final record for a whopping .416 winning percentage. The Crimson's 87-78 win over the Judges doesn't stack up, however, when you consider that the Walthamites usually spend their time playing Division Three caliber opponents. The 10-14 record, bad as it is, covers the fact that Brandeis is simply in an inferior league. But a win is a win.

Of Harvard's other seven victories, none came against a team with a winning percentage of better than .350. Rochester, defeated by an 86-75 count, ranks at the top of the victim list with an 8-15 (.348) log, followed closely by Boston college and its 9-17 (.346) record.

Rounding out the abbreviated list are the old standby favorites, Columbia (8-17, .320), Cornell (8-18, .308), Brown (7-20, .259), Yale (7-20, .259), and Boston University (7-19, .269).

Harvard managed to defeat these teams, as everybody else in the United States did, but Tom Sanders & Co. have one leg up on the rest of the nation. Harvard also managed to lose to five of the teams mentioned on separate occasions, negating whatever prowess might be attributed to the victories.

The Crimson split its season series with the worst teams the Ivy League has to offer--Brown, Yale, Columbia and Cornell--not exactly something to write home about. In addition, it went 1-1 against Boston College, a squad whose season paralleled the history of the Hindenburg.

So what are we left with? The knowledge that the only teams Harvard was definitely better than this season were the outfits from Brandeis, Rochester, and B.U. Their combined record was 25-48. The Crimson's total of eight victories was amassed against teams whose final records add up to 64-140, or a .313 winning percentage.

Taken by itself, the 1975-76 season was an unmitigated disaster, ranking Harvard's basketball program with the worst in the nation. But was this year much worse than those gone by, a disaster when compared to the school's basketball history? The answer is not quite so clear.

This season included, the last 16 years of IAB basketball have produced only 4 winning campaigns, not an impressive record by any stretch of the imagination. The composite of those seasons is 168-220, a won-lost record which accurately reflects the entire history of Harvard basketball.

In 65 years of trying, Crimson varsities have turned up a grand total of 577 victories to go along with 730 losses. In view of this, it becomes reasonable to suggest that there is no basis for expecting Harvard to come up with a winning season, much less a sound program that develops a tradition of winning. In fact, coach Sanders alluded to this earlier in the year when he suggested that Harvard basketball players-students have too much on their minds to become successful on the court.

This is hardly a novel outlook, nor is it devoid of any merit. Most of the ballplayers on this year's squad will readily admit that they play the game more for fun than anything else. Few hopes for professional contracts are maintained in the IAB, and the high-powered edge of big-time basketball is non-existent there.

But the connection between big-time hoop and a winning basketball program is only a tenuous one, and the concept of the player-student often becomes no more than a facile explanation for a losing season at Harvard, one which evades the real question of why other schools can develop good programs and this school can't.