Tip-Off at 4. Again, Tip-Off At 4

TigerBlog starts out with a reminder that if you come to Jadwin Gym tonight at 7 looking for men's basketball, you'll already have missed it.

Tip-off tonight for the Princeton-Brown men's basketball game is 4, not 7. If you're not in the Princeton area, you can see the game on ESPNU.

If you want to listen on the radio, you can hear Patrick McCarthy on WPRB with TigerBlog, who texted Patrick yesterday and asked him if he knew what time the game was. He responded "4:00!"

It also took Patrick about 15 seconds to get back to TigerBlog. This made TB email Patrick's father Tom McCarthy, the former Princeton play-by-play man, to say that his own kids would never have gotten back to him that quickly and would Patrick get back to Tom that quickly.

Tom said yes, Patrick is pretty good about getting back to him. It's one of his daughters who never does.

Anyway, once again, that's tip-off at 4.

When the game was moved, TB was pretty sure it would be a big one as far as the Ivy League races were concerned, and that's exactly what has transpired. Princeton is one of three teams, along with Harvard and Yale, who will definitely be in the Ivy tournament next weekend at New Haven. Brown comes into the game today (did TB mention it tips at 4?) where it wants to be when it gets on the bus tomorrow night to go back to Providence - in fourth place.

Staying there won't be easy for the Bears, though they do have some margin for error here. The easiest thing for Brown is to win tomorrow night against Penn and have Cornell lose at one game, and then the Bears are in their first ILT.

There are all kinds of scenarios, some straightforward and some complex. There's an excellent summary of it all on the Ivy League page, and you can read it HERE.

Princeton, for its part, can be seeded either No. 1, No. 2 or No. 3 in the tournament. Princeton can get an outright championship or a share of the championship, but it can get neither unless 1) the Tigers at a minimum beat Yale but more likely sweep and 2) Harvard loses to either Columbia, Cornell or both.

No matter what, though, today's game is huge for both teams.

AND IT STARTS AT 4.

On the women's side, Courtney Banghart's team, 10-2 in the league and tied with Penn for first place, has also clinched a spot in the ILT. A pair of wins on the road at Brown and Yale would mean no worse than a share of the championship and the top seed in next week's event.

HERE is the women's version of the story about tiebreaker scenarios. There are four teams who arecompeting for the last two spots, though Brown is not one of them. This could be a bad thing for Princeton and Penn, since the Bears' postseason is actually this last weekend of the regular season, and Brown would like nothing more than to knock off one or both of the teams at the top to end the season and build momentum into the offseason.

The Ivy League basketball championships are the last ones of the winter that will be decided.

The wrestling championship was decided a few weeks ago, but this is still a huge weekend in that sport, as the EIWA championships will be contested at Binghamton. You can read TB's colleague Craig Sachson's very in-depth preview HERE.

In short, the Tigers are hoping to finish second on the team side and qualify somewhere from five to seven wrestlers for the upcoming NCAA championships.

Princeton has finished third at the EIWA meet the last two years. The Tigers won the 1978 EIWA title and then didn't have a finish as high as fifth until 2016, followed by back-to-back thirds. Again, this program has had a meteoric rise.

In another sport where NCAA bids are on the line, the men's and women's fencing teams are at Lafayette tomorrow for the regionals. You can read about those HERE.

Beyond that, there a lot of other events involving Princeton teams this weekend, including weight thrower Adam Kelly at the NCAA championships, both hockey teams in the ECAC playoffs (TB wrote about that yesterday), a home women's lacrosse game against Stony Brook, the chase for the Meistrell Cup between Princeton and Rutgers in Piscataway and a baseball road trip.

The complete schedule is HERE.

And once again, let TB finish where he started:

Tip-off for Princeton-Brown tonight on Carril Court is at 4.