Michael James is the RTC correspondent for the Ivy League. You can also find his musings on Twitter at@mrjames2006 and @ivybball.

Looking Back

• Holiday Revival: Heading into the winter exam break, things looked pretty bad for the Ivies. The league had seven combined wins against the top 200 and nearly two times as many losses against teams outside that range. Then, Princeton grabbed a huge upset at home against top 50 Bucknell and a cascade of strong performances followed. Brown secured the Ivy League’s first win in a game broadcast by its new television partner, NBC Sports Network, by knocking off Providence, and Harvard followed with a road win at California. Even the performances in losses were impressive. Pennsylvania lost in overtime at Wagner before playing No. 17 Butler close. Yale led Iowa State for 30 minutes before falling by 10 points. Harvard led St. Mary’s for 39 minutes before losing by one. In its wins and losses, the Ivy League has shown some considerable improvement over the past two weeks.
• Welcome to Monte Carlo: With league play about to begin, it’s time to refresh the Ivy prediction model and simulate the upcoming campaign based on the quality of each team’s non-conference results. For those unfamiliar with the practice, using Pomeroy-style ratings to measure the quality of each Ivy team, a winning percentage for each league game can be generated, and thousands of seasons can be simulated to find the most common results:

1. Both Harvard and Princeton are expected to finish at 11-3.
2. Columbia clocks in two games behind at 9-5.
3. The rest of the league is a jumble with Cornell and Yale expected to go 6-8 and Penn and Brown expected to land at 5-9.
4. Dartmouth falls to the basement, two games back at 3-11.

• With ties allowed, the Crimson wins the title 58 percent of the time and Princeton 54 percent, while Columbia snags a share in seven percent of simulations. Without ties, Harvard wins 41 percent of solo titles, while Princeton grabs 37 percent and Columbia just three percent. An Ivy playoff for the NCAA bid is expected in 19 percent of simulations, so the league office might be actively shopping sites in March for a third straight season.

Mike Martin And The Bears Notched An Historic Upset Of Providence (AP)

• Signature Win: Since the 1989-90 season, Ivy teams not named Pennsylvania or Princeton have won just 25 non-conference games against top 100 opposition. Brown has been responsible for four of those notable victories, picking up its fourth last week with a thrilling 69-68 win over Providence, in which the Bears trailed by seven with under a minute to play. The win gave first-year coach Mike Martin his first signature win at the helm of a Division I team. Common threads abound, but the most interesting one is that all of Brown’s top 100 wins have had the Friars as the victim. The most recent one prior to this season occurred in 2006-07, when Craig Robinson, also in his rookie year coaching the Bears, navigated his squad to an ugly 51-41 victory. Robinson would take his team to the CBI Tournament the next year and would leave to take the Oregon State job after that season. Brown fans have to be hoping that Martin, who was a former standout guard for the Bears from 2001-04, will lead them down the former path without exploring the latter.

Reader’s Take

Power Rankings

1. Harvard (7-5) – Over the past 17 seasons, there have only been seven regularly used freshmen with a usage rate of 20 percent or greater to post an offensive rating of over 1.1 points per possession. The two most recent members of that lofty group were Amaker recruits Kyle Casey and Laurent Rivard and a third, Siyani Chambers, is currently on pace to join them. After a disastrous performance in the Crimson’s 67-62 victory over California, Chambers finished with 16 points and seven assists against St. Mary’s, nearly willing the team to a second-straight upset. Ultimately, some extremely poor execution down the stretch left Harvard on the losing end of a thrilling 70-69 nail-biter, but the Crimson and its freshman point guard have made it quite clear that the road to the Ivy title still runs through Boston. Read the rest of this entry »