PRINCETON, N.J.--Leaving Philadelphia on 1-76, there's a billboard advertising Temple basketball.

"Winning is an attitude," the billboard proclaims. "Temple basketball on 91.1 WCWR-FM."

Oh, if it were only that simple for the Harvard men's basketball team.

Harvard took a couple of broadsides to its self-esteem this weekend. Its 74-62 loss to Pennsylvania hurt, but came nowhere near to the pain inflicted by Princeton's 87-50 demolition of the Crimson.

"Princeton brought out the worst in us," Harvard Coach Frank Sullivan said.

Forward Mike Minor put it a bit more succinctly: "We sucked."

The most depressing aspect of the Crimson's four-game losing streak has been the return of the poor quality of play which dogged the team earlier in the season. Turnovers, the Crimson's Achilles heel, have returned with a vengeance. Harvard lost the ball 47 times this weekend. It's left Harvard kind of shell-shocked.

"I'm really disappointed with the way we've played," forward Tyler Rullman said. "We've got to get back to the level we played at [against Hartford, Yale and Brown]."

"If we hadn't won those three games, 'We'd be absolutely miserable right now," Rullman added.

Rullman looked pretty miserable anyway after the games. But he raised the key issue: what's happened to the Crimson of our games ago?

The losses to Cornell and Columbia can be attributed to the road. But Penn and Princeton were a different story. Fatigue was not as much of an issue here.

Playing poorly was.

"We weren't making them work," Minor said. "At times, we just collapsed."

Pressure Defenses

The issue this weekend was the style of play of the opponents. Penn and Princeton bring mobile offenses and pressure defenses that the Crimson cannot cope with. While Harvard was not playing its best basketball, it might have survived against other teams.