{shortcode-5c87ef88bff32500009f64107d95ba03e4aaf5d9}

Some of my fondest memories of growing up are playing sports with my two younger brothers. While teaming up with them against our neighbors or cousins in street hockey, basketball, and wiffle ball was a thrill, I think I derived even more joy from being able to count on a win when I played against them in various backyard sports, oftentimes with rules that I made up, for much of my adolescent life.

Like all good things, using the fact that I was further along developmentally to teach the youth a lesson eventually did catch up with me. Those two-handed dunks on the hoop in our bedroom began being blocked and those wiffle balls that I promised I wasn’t throwing my hardest eventually began landing in our neighbor’s creek. While my middle brother is playing club baseball in college and the other is a two-sport high school athlete, I’m writing from a glorified fallout shelter contemplating whether I should run off my most recent Felipe’s burrito. But I swear it wasn’t always this way.

The Brown men’s basketball team knows a thing or two about what it’s like to be a little brother. In recent years, the Bears have received worse treatment from Harvard than even nine-year-old me could have imagined giving my brothers.

In fact, since Tommy Amaker took over in 2007, the Crimson is 15-3 against the Bears, its best record against any Ivy League opponent. Part of the reason why Brown may be so good at playing the role of Harvard’s younger brother is because it almost exclusively recruits players who are already used to doing it. Brown coach Mike Martin probably has the top roster in the nation when it comes to players living in their older brothers’ shadows.

Steven Spieth has all the ingredients to be a successful Ivy League small forward—he’s 6’6”, is a lethal three-point shooter, and is an above-average rebounder. However, the Jesuit-educated Spieth will always be known as the younger brother of 2015 PGA Tour Player of the Year Jordan Spieth. The Bears’ leading scorer could score 64 points in tonight’s game and it would immediately bring me back to the 64 his older brother shot at Augusta in 2015.

Joshua Howard is a key piece in Martin’s freshman recruiting class. The most famous person in Howard’s family is his father, Juwan, an NBA All-Star, two-time NBA Champion, and member of Michigan’s Fab Five, but his older brother, Juwan Jr., is no slouch.

Juwan Howard, Jr. averaged 17.8 points per game over his final two seasons at the University of Detroit and played on the Miami Heat’s summer league team two summers ago.

While Brown sophomore guard Obi Okolie presumably has big feet, he’s going to need them because of the legacy left by his older brother, Agunwa (Harvard ’16), last season’s Ivy League Defensive Player of the Year. The elder Okolie posted a perfect 8-0 record against the Bears in his four-year career with the Crimson.

Sophomore guard Chris Sullivan is the shortest of a trio of brothers who have all played at Brown. Like many players for the Bears, Chris has had a less illustrious career than those of his siblings. His older brothers, Peter and Matthew, were both 1,000-point scorers in college. Chris only needs 942 more points to make it into the exclusive club.

While Brown junior guard Patrick Triplett does not in fact have two twin brothers, if he did, one would probably be an Olympic skier and the other would have just won a championship with the Cavaliers.

A starting five composed of Jordan Spieth, Juwan Howard, Jr., the two oldest Sullivan brothers, and Agunwa Okolie could not only handily defeat this year’s Dartmouth team but would also be my pick to bring home a Ryder Cup crowd.

In addition to recruiting players with famous older brothers, Martin is fond of bringing players he sees as versatile into the fold. He described three of his underclassmen with that adjective in this year’s media guide.

Claiming that a 6’1” point guard who is shooting 30.6 percent from three and has more turnovers and personal fouls than he does assists is versatile is like trying to make the same argument about Meek Mill.

As an aside, I love Meek—he shot the music video for Ima Boss outside of my high school and is a fixture at Sixers game—but sometimes Dreamchasers can feel like one 70-minute song.