Take Three

TigerBlog hopes you enjoy this week's edition of "Conversations With Carla," the weekly podcast with head women's basketball coach Carla Berube.

This was an extra special edition, mostly because it took three tries to get it done.

The first only went a minute or so before TB sensed something wasn't right with the sound. The second time was the full 12-minute version, only the sound problem hadn't been fixed. When you listed to that version, all you heard was something similar to Charlie Brown's teacher. Or maybe a combination of that and the sound an MRI makes.

Fortunately, Berube is a good sport, and she agreed to record another version, after TB's colleague Cody Chrusciel fixed the problem. And what was the solution to the problem?

Restart the computer, of course.

Anyway, thanks again to Carla for being so good about things. You can hear the actual, listenable version HERE.

This week's conversation had a lot of ground to cover.

First, there was the fact that Princeton hasn't played since Jan. 11, which was the 75-55 win over Penn in the Ivy opener. That game was Princeton's only game since Dec. 29 - more than a month ago - which means the Tigers will have played only that one game in 33 days when they take on Dartmouth Friday in Hanover (and then head to Harvard Saturday).

The reason for the big gap was first-semester exams, which for the final time were in January. For Berube, the last time for an exam break was the first time for her, since she is in her first season at Princeton.

Her school for the last 17 years was Tufts, which places in the NESCAC, which plays Friday night/Saturday afternoon games and does so all through January. For Berube, this was a pretty big adjustment.

Then there's the new schedule that the Ivy League announced earlier this week.

The traditional travel-partner format of six Ivy weekends of back-to-backs dates to the 1958 seasons, or the third official year of Ivy men's basketball. In the first two seasons, the schedule was somewhat random, with only two weekends of back-to-backs and no real order to the sequence of playing teams.

The current format stayed that way through this year. As the world evolves, especially with the change to Princeton's academic schedule, the 2020-21 season will see a whole new way of doing things.

This time, each team will start on Jan. 2 and play three on the same days throughout. There will be three weekends with back-to-backs and a fourth with a game Saturday and then the Monday of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. TB really likes that idea.

Carla gives her thoughts on all of this as well in the podcast.

As for the current season, Princeton and Penn have played each other once while the other six schools have all played both of their travel-partner games so far. Each of the next six weekends will feature back-to-backs, and Princeton and Penn will play their other game at Jadwin on Feb. 25.

Yale is the only 2-0 team, having swept Brown. Harvard and Dartmouth and Cornell and Columbia all split their games.

Princeton is 13-1 on the season, with only a loss in overtime at No. 18 Iowa, who is 17-3 on the year, in the way of an unbeaten record so far.

Princeton leads the Ivy League in 11 statistical categories and is in the top 10 in Division I in five, including ranking third in scoring defense at 50.6. You get extra credit if you knew that Campbell leads Division I at 49.3.

Georgia Tech, by the way, is second at 50.5 heading into its game at Miami tonight. Should Miami get at least 56 points, then Princeton would move into second.

Campbell, by the way, is putting up insane defensive numbers. The Camels are 14-5 overall and 9-1 in the Big South, and the last six opponents have all been held to 47 or fewer. The last two have been held to 36 and 32.

Berube has been talking about defense since Day 1 at Princeton. The numbers Campbell is putting up impress her.

Of course, TB didn't ask her about that until version No. 3. Of the three versions, he thinks the last one was the best one.

At the very least, it was the only audible one.