Basketball unlikely to fall way of football

As a football beat writer, it is hard to resist the instinctive temptation to compare basketball’s recent loss at Harvard with Columbia’s flop on the gridiron at Penn this past October. Both losses came in the wake of a series of inspiring victories. Both represented the team’s first Ivy loss of the season. Both were suffered at the hands of a league powerhouse. But the basketball team’s ability to put a rough setback in the rearview mirror and take care of business just 24 hours later at Dartmouth has convinced me to be cautious about taking this comparison too far.

The lead-up to both defeats shared some strikingly similar features. Football had won three straight including a historic and gratifying 42-14 pounding against our favorite Jersey-based Ivy rival. As a comparison, basketball was coming off two thrilling victories against Cornell, last year’s league champion. Yes, basketball’s win streak came against more formidable opponents, but the sentiment was similar heading into the pivotal matchups. The two Light Blue squads rode into battle against league heavyweights on the road, knowing that a win would signal that the Lions really could play with the big boys.

The losses were sobering. Football trailed big from the opening quarter and never really threatened a serious comeback. Basketball stuck with Harvard through halftime but seemed to run out of gas down the stretch, eventually losing by 11. Both teams swallowed a painful dose of reality, but the defeats came early enough in the season to keep championship aspirations alive—so long as the Lions could bounce back effectively.

Football could not. Norries Wilson’s squad imploded after the loss, following up with an inexcusable late-game defeat against Dartmouth at Homecoming in front of 10,000 friendly fans. Within a month, the Lions went from 1-0 in the Ivies to 1-4. Each loss seemed to fuel the succeeding one, and a promising season rapidly fell by the wayside.

Basketball also faced Dartmouth—a team widely considered inferior—but the venue was Hanover, the Lions were road-weary, and Kyle Smith’s crew had less than a day to recover from its first league loss of the year. Defeat against the Big Green, even on the road, would have buried the Lions. You can’t expect to make waves in the Ivy League if you lose to the team picked to finish dead last by the preseason media poll. The script looked eerily familiar.

But this time, Columbia won. Noruwa Agho carried the team, and helped the Lions grind out the decisive victory after a sloppy first half. Basketball succeeded exactly where football failed. Good teams are allowed to lose to other good teams, but not to bad teams. One defeat against a league leader ultimately doomed football. Basketball, however, did not blink.

There is a broader significance to basketball’s win at Dartmouth this weekend, one that becomes clearer when placed next to football’s loss to the Big Green this fall.

Columbia sports teams have small but very loyal fan followings. Support from certain groups—parents, alumni, die-hard students—will always be unconditional, but the rest of the student body remains on the sidelines, desperate for some good news. Sports fans here crave something to cheer about, and only success in the high-profile sports, football and men’s basketball, can satiate that desire. We saw the football team get our hopes up in October. It is not the loss to eventual league-champion Penn that still festers three months down the road, but the ensuing defeat to lowly Dartmouth. We would be saying the same thing about the 2011 basketball season if Saturday’s game had ended differently.

Focusing on the players and coaches and not the fans, there are two other key reasons the basketball team should finish its season in better shape than football did. One is Agho. Football also had a superstar in linebacker Alex Gross, but with all due respect to that eminent sport, its rules and makeup simply don’t allow for a defender to take over a game. Not so in basketball. Agho is virtually unstoppable when he’s on a roll, and he’s perfectly capable of putting the team on his shoulders from time to time.

Kyle Smith, the rookie coach, is the other reason. It isn’t Norries Wilson’s fault that he’s been coaching football here for five years, but Smith’s limited tenure is a blessing for his team. Columbia sports suffer across the board due to a prevailing culture of mediocrity, and the mere fact that the basketball team has a fresh leader can inspire motivational phrases such as “clean slate” and “new standards.”

Princeton, the basketball team’s Feb. 11 opponent, looms as the next key challenge, but Brown and Yale, middle-of-the-pack league rivals, are on the slate for next weekend. If Smith, Agho and company take anything away from football’s experience, it should be this: good teams don’t let mediocrity beat them.

Jacob Levenfeld is a List College senior majoring in history and Talmud.