Ivy Is in League of Its Own

You practically need an Ivy League education to figure out the race this season in the only remaining Division I conference without a tournament.

Let Edwin Draughan, a Yale freshman from Lakewood Mayfair High, try to explain.

“Right now, Princeton is in first place at 9-2, we’re in second at 9-3 and Penn is in third place at 8-3,” said Draughan, Yale’s leading scorer at just shy of 12 points a game. “There’s a real possibility of a three-way tie, and if there is a three-way tie, we go to a playoff where we play Princeton, then the winner goes on to play Penn for the championship.

“But for that to happen, Penn has to beat Princeton, and we have to win our last two games.”

Put in terms everyone with a public university education can understand:

“It’s real crazy,” Draughan said.

Yale could have clinched its first trip to the NCAA tournament since 1962 with wins over Princeton and Pennsylvania last weekend but lost both. Now the Bulldogs have to hope all the cards fall to clinch the first three-way tie for the Ivy League title in history--creating what would amount to a mini-conference tournament in the only league that resists holding one.

Penn, which won at Princeton, 62-38, in the first meeting and is an impressive 21-6 overall, would get a first-round bye because it would have the best head-to-head record among the three teams.

Sites and dates for the potential mini-tournament have yet to be determined, but need to be set quickly because the NCAA field is announced March 10.

The crucial Princeton-Penn game is Tuesday, with all three teams also playing tonight and Saturday.

It has all been quite a whirlwind for Draughan, who picked Yale over Rutgers, Providence and Long Beach State.

When he and Mayfair teammate Josh Childress--Stanford’s fourth-leading scorer as a freshman--parted ways, their prospects of ending up in the NCAA tournament together seemed far-fetched. Now there’s at least a chance, but when the two talk on the phone, it usually isn’t about basketball.

“We kind of compare school, how I think my classes at Yale are extremely more difficult than his classes at Stanford--and he thinks otherwise,” Draughan said.

Draughan chose Yale partly for the education, of course, but partly because Coach James Jones persuaded him Yale could contend for the Ivy League title, won by either Princeton or Penn in 31 of the last 33 seasons.

“At first I wasn’t too interested. I didn’t think it was too much of a basketball powerhouse,” Draughan said. “Coach Jones, he really tried to tell me we were going to have a chance to go to the NCAA tournament. I knew if not this year, sooner or later we could be in the NCAAs.”

Although Yale (17-9) managed to win at Penn State and at Clemson this season, Penn has been the real star of the Ivy League. Penn has beaten Georgia Tech, Iowa State, Villanova, Temple and St. Joseph’s and had a Ratings Percentage Index of 41 through Wednesday.

If Princeton (14-9) or Yale were to win the automatic bid, Penn would have a case for an at-large bid, based on its 20-plus victories and respectable RPI. If Penn wins the Ivy bid, the others stay home.

But the Ivy League is making strides. As a conference, the Ivy RPI is No. 13 this season as computed by collegerpi.com--a leap from 28th last season that equals the largest by any conference since 1994, when the statistic was first tracked.

Going Ivy proved a good decision for Draughan. “Yale is not like what most people think, all nerds. It’s a pretty fun school,” he said.

Yale, a party school?

“It’s not a non-party school, I’ll tell you that,” said Draughan, whose social life centers around the team and Saybrook residential college, where he lives.

“During football games, in the third quarter, there’s something called the Saybrook Strip,” Draughan said. “I’ve never done that, and I won’t.”