Harvard Basketball

Don’t expect any Ivy League basketball team to compete with Harvard this year. They’re quite simply in another class (photo credit: Chensiyuan).

The Ivy League basketball season is about to kick into high gear. Sure, the eight Ivy League teams have been playing for a while now (they’re each over 10 games into their schedules) but they haven’t competed against each other quite yet…though that’s about to change. So which Ivy League basketball team is looking good coming into the Ivy League season? The answer would be Harvard, Harvard, Harvard. In fact, this year, Tommy Amaker’s Harvard basketball team looks like it belongs in the ACC more so than it does in the Ivy League!

Harvard has beaten (and in many cases crushed) MIT, Holy Cross, Loyola Marymount, Utah (big win), Florida State (big win), UCF, Vermont (big win), Seattle, Boston University, Florida Atlantic University, and since we’ve published this post they’ve knocked out Boston College (big win) and St. Joseph’s (big win). They’ll play their first Ivy League foe on January 7th when they face Dartmouth at home but don’t expect much of a game as we don’t imagine any Ivy League basketball team will be competitive with Harvard this year. They’re quite simply that good!

In fact, according to an ESPN piece on the Harvard basketball team by Eamonn Brennan, “Harvard is the Ivy League favorite. This is not an insight. With so much talent in Tommy Amaker’s lineup, the Crimson have been the obvious preseason favorite to win their seemingly overmatched league since, oh, April…In other words, it will be no surprise to hear that when John Templon of the excellent NYC Buckets ran 10,000 simulations of the forthcoming Ivy League season, Harvard emerged as the heavy favorite…What may surprise you, however, is the sheer depth and breadth of Harvard’s apparent superiority. Of the 10,000 simulated seasons John projected, the Crimson won 9,508 of them — just over 95 percent. As John writes: ‘That’s incredible.'”

Check out this post on the Ivy League and NBA.