When he arrived on campus in the fall of 2015, sophomore forward Travis Fuller stated that the reason he chose Brown was “to win a championship.” While his ambitions may be a tad unrealistic, there is no denying that the Bears are better than they have been in quite some time and that Martin has his alma mater on the right track.

Brown accounted for two of Harvard’s six Ivy League wins last year and went 3-11 in conference play last season. The Bears already have two conference wins this year and blew out a Holy Cross team that handed the Crimson a home loss earlier in the season.

To see how far Brown has come in a year, one only has to look at the decreased load that senior guard Tavon Blackmon has had to shoulder since four freshmen arrived in Providence this fall.

Blackmon was a do-everything guard for Martin last season, averaging 13.3 points and 5.5 assists in 34.4 minutes per game last year. The Gonzaga College High School graduate averaged 18 points when facing Harvard in two games last season.

Blackmon is still a key piece for the 2016-2017 Bears but other players have stepped up. Spieth is averaging 16.2 points per game and seven players are averaging more than 7.5 points per game.

Five underclassmen log at least 14 minutes a game for Martin. The Bears enter Friday’s contest with an 11-11 record and has allowed exactly the same number of points as they have scored. The last time Brown was above .500 before this season was when the team was 9-8 on Jan. 12, 2015.

Friday’s contest largely feels like a trap game for the Crimson for several reasons. First, the Bears are easy to overlook from a historical point of view. The last time that Brown beat Harvard, the Crimson’s leading scorer, freshman guard Bryce Aiken, was in fifth grade.

To add to the distractions, the game is on the road exactly 24 hours before one of the Crimson’s most important games of the season. Saturday’s contest comes against Yale, the team’s biggest rival, and the only Ancient Eight foe that beat Harvard twice last season.

The Crimson has not won both games of a road Ivy League weekend since Harvard beat the Bears and Bulldogs over two years ago.

Sophomore guard Corey Johnson often alludes to how important it is for the young Crimson team to play a full 40 minutes. Harvard has yet to do so in an Ivy League contest in 2017. The Crimson has found itself trailing at halftime in each of its last five games and has faced double-digit deficits in its last four. Harvard has to make sure that it is not trying to beat Yale before the team bus pulls into New Haven since Brown is 9-4 in games it is leading at halftime.

Finally, early February is prime upset season. Four of the nation’s top ten teams have lost since the calendar flipped. Princeton and Yale are the only Ivy League teams who bring perfect February records into the month’s second weekend.

While this year’s Crimson team will largely be remembered for how it fares against the Bulldogs, Tigers, and in the Ivy League Tournament, it needs to beat the Bears for those moments to matter.

Losing to Princeton in heartbreaking fashion last Saturday could be exactly the wake-up call that Harvard needs to avoid a slow start this weekend. We will learn a lot about the Crimson this weekend. We will learn whether it takes last Saturday’s loss as motivation to bulldoze the Bears or as an excuse for a slow start. We will learn how this young roster prepares for a weekend in which Saturday is a rivalry game and potential Ivy League Tournament matchup while the night before is projected as a mere formality. Ultimately, we will learn how fast Harvard’s little brother is growing up.

Now to the picks:

HARVARD AT BROWN