NCAA Game Day

It's NCAA tournament Game Day for the Princeton women's basketball team. 

The Tigers are doing something that they've never done before: play in a First Four game. It'll be a matchup of 11 seeds, as Princeton takes on Iowa State at Notre Dame this evening at 7. You can see the game on ESPNU.

The winner gets sixth-seeded Michigan Friday. 

Before you think about the Princeton-Iowa State game, consider the extraordinary moment in Ivy League sports history, as there are three women's basketball teams who have reached the NCAA tournament. 

The first time an Ivy League team played in the NCAA tournament was in 1983, which was the second NCAA event for the women. That year Dartmouth was selected into the 36-team field and lost in the play-in round 77-58 to Monmouth. 

Extra credit if you can name the conference Monmouth was in back then. Trust TigerBlog. You can't. It was the Cosmopolitan Conference (along with Marist, Wagner, Queens, LIU, Montclair State, FDU and Siena).

It wouldn't be until 1994 that the league would appear again, this time via the automatic bid. The first one went to Brown. It was in 1998 that 16th seeded Harvard took down a top-seeded Stanford team that was minus three starters to injury, and from then until Princeton's win over Wisconsin-Green Bay in 2015 the league was one-and-done.

There were some close losses in that stretch, though the record is dotted with massive blowouts. The average loss by the Ivy champ in those 16 years was just short of 23 points. 

And now? You have three teams in the tournament. You have large crowds at Ivy games. The players are more athletic, better shooters, skilled ball-handlers, stronger defenders — and they play a way more intense version than the league did 25 years ago. Princeton alone has won three NCAA games, including back-to-back in 2022 and 2023.

Maybe the most shocking thing about the three teams is that it wasn't so shocking after all?

With that as background, there's the matter of the games themselves in this tournament. Harvard will take on Michigan State Saturday at 4:30. Columbia is also playing in a First Four game, tomorrow at 7. 

Princeton's challenge is a big one, a 6-foot-3 one, to be exact. That would be Iowa State's Audi Crooks, the 6-3 force who led the Big 12 and is eighth in Division I in scoring (23.2 points per game). She made more than 60 percent of her shots and ranked third in Division I in field goal percentage. 

No player in Division I women's basketball made more baskets this season than the 304 that Crooks did. Oh, and she also had six games with at least 30 points. 

Here's an interesting note for you: Princeton averages 66.8 points per game. Iowa State allows 66.9 points per game. 

Also, Iowa State ranks 45th in Division I in rebounding margin. Princeton ranks 46th.

Iowa State, not surprisingly, scores nearly 80 points per game. Princeton allows fewer than 60. 

The Tigers have gone through an emotional roller-coaster in the last few days. There was the loss to Harvard in the Ivy tournament semifinals, followed by the uncertainty of if there would be an NCAA bid, followed by the joy that bid brought. 

As with any NCAA appearance, the days leading up to the first game are otherworldly. There's the travel. There's the venue. There's the preparation. There's the understanding that this is an opportunity to do something historic. 

Princeton has gotten to experience that all week. If you've been following the team's social media, you've seen nothing but smiles. 

Now it's time to shift emotions and get to the point of the trip  — the part where the ball goes up and the game is on. It takes a few minutes to settle the nerves, and then it becomes another game. 

Well, not another game. But you get the point. It becomes about doing the things you do well, adjusting to an unknown opponent, following the scouting report that has been put together and then playing hard and executing. 

The Ivy League has done something incredible for this NCAA women's tournament. This will always be remembered as the year that three teams reached the tournament, something nobody would have ever foreseen not that long ago. 

Now it's time to play. The three teams have earned this chance.