“I think somebody said something to him,” Sullivan said.
And for all highlight-reel material provided by Onyekwe in the second half, even Penn coach Fran Dunphy chafed at his tendency to cherry-pick.
“Sometimes he takes a few too many chances and leaves his teammates back five-on-four,” Dunphy said, with Onyekwe seated right next to him.
“I was yelling at [Onyekwe] one time when I thought he could have dove on the floor,” Dunphy later added.
Onyekwe will have to improve his focus down the stretch. The entire team will have to, actually.
Said Dunphy on Friday: “They listen to me sometimes. They don’t listen to me all the time.”
Right now, at least, it appears they’re listening. With some help from Princeton against Yale next Saturday, Penn can earn the Ivy’s automatic bid to NCAAs by winning out.
The Crimson had a chance at halftime on Friday, just as they did the next night against Princeton, when they led 30-23. But on both nights, they were burned by outside shooting that swung the momuntum in the home teams’ favor.
On Friday, Penn’s Andrew Toole, who had been hampered by foul trouble in the Harvard upset, and Jeff Schiffner combined for five threes in the first 10 minutes of the second half. Their shooting—absent at Lavietes—pushed Penn’s lead firmly into double-digits.
“We just didn’t see that at home,” Sullivan said. “We had no answers.”
The scene was repeated the next night against Princeton. Harvard was successful in hedging off screens and staying with their assignments in the first half. But when Tigers Coach John Thompson III put four shooters on the floor all at once in the second half, it created room for Mike Bechtold to nail the 99th, 100th and 101st three-pointers of his career in rapid succession to open up a lead.
Once again, Harvard had no answers.
“I think we tried like four guys [on Bechtold],” Harvey said.
Add to that the fact that Harvard was playing in hostile territory where it hasn’t won in over a decade and things went from bad to worse in a hurry.
With five losses, Harvard’s only real recourse now is to play spoiler when the team visits first-place Yale in two weeks. Asked how he’ll motivate the team the rest of the way, Sullivan talked about wanting to win 16 games. Whether that goal will be enough to spark a team that couldn’t get inspired enough to beat Cornell with its season on the line, remains to be seen.
Heading into this past weekend, the romantics among us were dreaming of how much better position Harvard would be in had it avoided last month’s second-half meltdown versus Yale. If not for that loss and the subsequent flop against the Big Red, then Harvard would have had a bona fide title shot.
But even that scenario assumed that the Quakers would continue to play flat. With the way Penn is playing now, a win over Yale probably wouldn’t have mattered much. The Elis also might not matter much longer if the Quakers keep playing like they did last weekend.