Senior wing Wesley Saunders appears to be rounding into form after Harvard swept Brown and Yale on the road this weekend.

Before getting to the basketball, I want to begin this column with a moment of mourning for the three University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill students who were shot Wednesday—Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha. My thoughts and prayers are with the deceased and their families.  

With that, let’s return to Ivy League basketball, dear reader. 

Last weekend, Harvard swept Brown and Yale by a grand total of four points, further evoking shades of the 2012 team with a gritty win in Payne Whitney to ascend to the top of the Ivy League. The Crimson plays only two of its final eight contests on the road and appear to have senior wing and reigning Ivy League Player of the Year Wesley Saunders (24.5 ppg last weekend) in peak form. 

Yale travels this weekend to Princeton, who blew a golden chance to separate itself from the league’s middle tier—namely, the Gentleman’s C’s—by giving up a 26-0 run to Cornell. Last year, the Bulldogs roared back from a double-digit halftime lead at home for a one-point overtime win, squashing any hopes Princeton had of making the NCAA Tournament. Two weeks later, the Tigers returned the favor in Jadwin with an 11-point win that put Yale’s title hopes on life support. 

Princeton’s precarious position illustrates the danger of the Ivy League, where the conference often becomes a two-horse race after the third or fourth weekend. 

No league champion since 1980 has finished with five or more losses. For all the talk about an extremely deep Ivy League, Harvard and Yale have opened up a two-game lead in the win column over the field. 

With road sweeps difficult to come by, a team like Princeton will need to be nearly perfect at home the rest of the way and win in at least one at Cambridge and New Haven to have a realistic shot at the title. 

A quick exercise in binomial probability can help us see how difficult this is. Even if Princeton—who rates as the fourth-best team in the league, via KenPom—has a 60 percent chance of winning each of its remaining games, it has only a 23 percent chance of finishing 7-2 or better. With extremely optimistic projections, those are tough odds. 

CORNELL AT DARTMOUTH

Ah, the first of the Ivy League’s biannual color-fights. This is arguably the league’s least relevant matchup; the Big Red and the Big Green have only finished in the league’s top half in the same year once since 1980. Since John Wall personally squashed Cornell’s 2009 blaze of glory, neither has finished among the Ancient Eight’s top five. 

Both teams are frisky this year—Cornell consistently and Dartmouth in spurts. Both have used titanic runs to take out a league elite (Princeton and Harvard, respectively) while failing to come to play consistently. Both have the ignominy of double-digit losses to Penn on their schedule, wounds that cut deep. 

But don’t just take that from me. The Friday loss so badly upset the sports writers of the Cornell Daily Sun that they didn’t write about it until Wednesday. If the Big Red lose here, the snow might melt before news gets out. 

Pick: Dartmouth

YALE AT PENN

Coming off its first adversity of conference play, Yale should listen to Frank Kaminsky.