Crooked Necks

While Cornell basketball is only one of the 36 varsity sports at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York it is the one sport that most Americans think of when their minds wander to Cornell athletics (which is not very often).

Cornell basketball made history during the 2009-2010 season by cracking into the top 25 in the ESPN/USA Today coaches poll for the first time in decades. In fact, the last time the Cornell Big Red hoops team was ranked in the top 25 Harry Truman was in office and the date was January 3, 1951. That date marks over 59 years between appearances in the top 25 polls.

Cornell University is no stranger to top 25 rankings, however up until this season their specialty was the annual US News and World Report publication that ranks the top universities in America (Cornell finished number 15 in the 2010 edition). The very fact that Cornell has had such a long absence from the upper echelon of college basketball has many devout hard court fans scratching their heads and wondering if the ranking is deserved or merely the result of victories against weak opponents in an unusually weak year for dynasty college hoops programs. Uninformed skeptics need not look further than the resume Cornell has built up through the first two thirds of the season to realize that the program has in fact been turned around under head coach Steve Donahue. Through January, 2010 the team already has victories over Alabama, St. John’s, Drexel, and a Harvard team touting a NBA prospect (Jeremy Lin). Despite a resume with impressive victories it was probably a narrow loss that really put Cornell back on the map. On January 6, 2010 Cornell lost on the road to the number one ranked Kansas Jayhawks in a game where Cornell led until the last minute of play.

Perhaps the most popular aspect of college basketball is that every March teams from schools of all sizes and basketball backgrounds converge to play in a national tournament where teams like Cornell with limited college basketball success have the opportunity to compete alongside historically rich universities like Kentucky, Kansas, and UCLA. Cornell basketball actually does have limited but recent experience in the NCAA Tournament. In both the 2008 and 2009 tournaments Cornell qualified for the Big Dance but was ousted in the first round each year (by Stanford and then Missouri). Prior to 2008 the previous Cornell invitations to the NCAA Tournament came in 1988 and 1954. Interestingly, despite four NCAA Tournament appearances (1954, 1988, 2008, and 2009) the Cornell program has a collective 0-5 record in the tournament. The curious five losses in four appearances is the result of a quirky 1954 24 team bracket that required Cornell to play a consolation game despite a narrow first round loss to Navy 69-67. Cornell followed that initial loss up by falling short to North Carolina State 65-54 shortly thereafter.

The Cornell basketball program hopes to reverse their post season woes by getting their first NCAA Tournament victory sooner rather than later. Coach Donahue, who inherited a last place Ivy League team in 2001, hopes that when it comes to his Cornell basketball team making NCAA Tournament appearances that the third time is the charm for breaking their postseason winless streak.

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