I haved started my annual summer talk with coaches and I would suspect that if they had to cast a poll vote today, it would look like:
Yale
Harvard
Penn
Columbia
Princeton
Cornell
Brown
Dartmouth
2 Likes
Would love to be in Ithaca next March.
While Harvard is arguable, what is the thought on Columbia? I don’t see that at all.
Richard: I initially misread your post as a ranking of the head coaches, not the teams. If you’re connecting with all the coaches, it might be impolitic for you to rank them but I’d be curious about the views of others. I’d have Jones at the top by himself, with Henderson next among the returning coaches. I don’t know much about McCaffery but he has good credentials and seems to be off to a good start to turning around Penn. If you were ranking recruiting as a stand-alone category, Amaker would be number one but what does that say about his work with his team, given Harvard’s performance over the last five plus years? Martin, McLaughlin and Jaques have each gotten their teams into the Ivy tournament recently. Brown had an awesome end of the 2023-24 season, arguably playing the best basketball of the league but dropping an Ivy Madness finals heartbreaker to Yale at the buzzer. Injuries decimated Brown this past season. Jaques inherited a good program but still impressive to have his team perform so well in his first season. And I’m still amazed at Dartmouth’s play this last season; kudos to McLaughlin. Too soon to say much about Hovde but he arrives with the credential of being part of a coaching staff that won the national championship. Overall, an impressive group of coaches.
LOL Preseason poll of the teams.
James, McCaffery and Mitch are elite and in that order.
That surprises me on a bunch of levels. Dartmouth obviously loses two key players, but do they really drop all the way to last when they return the majority of their starting lineup? Penn and Columbia get some extra juice with exciting new coaching staffs, but the talent level doesn’t appear to change (yet), and they were so far behind the rest of the league last year. And then there’s Harvard. Yes, they were only a game out of 4th, and they had some big wins (including over Yale). But they are so darn small, they run out a number of unrecruited players, and they really should have lost to Penn twice last year. Maybe Sullivan can play right away and help with the size, but I just don’t see them having the horses. All that said, somebody besides Yale has to win some games. I think Cornell and Dartmouth are the two teams that are undervalued in the list.
Harvard is returning its four best players from last year, was the only team that beat Yale, and has two 6’10" or taller guys coming back who missed all of last year with injury (assuming we aren’t blocked from having international students…). We’ve also got three freshmen 6’7" or taller coming in. So lack of size shouldn’t be the problem that it was last year.
1 Like