The Weekend In Shorts

For all of you in the Northeast, TigerBlog says "you're welcome."

For what? For bringing back the weather from Florida, of course.

If you were anywhere from Washington, D.C., to Boston this weekend, you may have noticed that it was hovering around 70 degrees. On January 11th and 12th.

As TB rode his bike this weekend, he was struck by two things: 1) there were a lot of people out riding as opposed to a normal mid-January day, when he'd be the only one out and 2) the weather was so much nicer than it will be more the majority of the spring seasons, but oh well.

In fact, it was so much better than the weather for last year's Ivy League lacrosse tournament, which was played in rain and temps that were maybe touching 50.

Oh well. It'll be winter at some point.

In the meantime, it's always good to be outside in shorts in January in the Princeton area, if only for a weekend.

For those inside in shorts this weekend, it couldn't have gone much better for those wearing the shorts of Princeton basketball. Both the men and the women had big wins, both defeating Penn and both making statements along the way.

It started Friday afternoon, when the men's team defeated the Quakers 63-58. The win was the second in six days for Princeton over its arch-rival, after the Tigers won 78-64 at the Palestra.

As TB said Friday, Princeton head coach Mitch Henderson has an extraordinary record against Penn, as both a player and coach. In fact, the win Friday was his 20th against the Quakers, against eight losses.

That's a winning percentage of .714 in games in which he has either played or coached. If you take the rest of the series, all of the games without Mitch Henderson, then Penn leads 122-97, or a winning percentage for Princeton of .443.

Henderson's record got TB thinking that the only person who could possibly approach his win total against Penn is obviously Pete Carril.

And so he looked it up.

Carril's record against Penn was 27-34. It was 26-26 before Penn went on an eight-game streak from 1993-96, and then Carril won his last game against the Quakers, during that incredible few days of 1996, when he led his team past Penn in the Ivy playoff to snap an eight-game losing streak to the Quakers and then followed it up five days later with the win over UCLA in the opening round of the NCAA tournament.

Carril's 27 wins are obviously more than Henderson's. He did it in 29 seasons, whereas Henderson has his 20 wins in four as a player and now nine as a head coach.

That record is extraordinary. It's even more extraordinary when you consider that he started out 0-4, playing in the last four of that eight-game streak. That makes him 20-4 since.

The more TB thinks about it, the more impressive it becomes.

The game Friday night was closer than the one at the Palestra, and the Tigers didn't go wire to wire like they did in Philly. They did, though, lead for the last 29:16, and playing with some margin for error is always a huge thing.

That's exactly what happened at the end, as Penn got within three before Jose Morales sealed it with a driving layup with 10 seconds left in the game and one second left on the shot clock. The Tigers got 38 points from Ryan Schwieger, Jaelin Llewellyn and Richmond Aririguzoh.

Suddenly the Tigers have won five of six and are 2-0 in the league heading into first semester exams. The next league game isn't until Jan. 31, so there's a long way to until then.

As for the women, they only played one game in January last year and had to stew over a loss to Penn for four weeks. This time, there's another game Jan. 31 - also Dartmouth - and this time there will be no stewing, not after the 75-55 win Saturday at the Palestra in the Ivy opener for both.

For the record, Carla Berube is now 19 wins away from Henderson, though she does have a 1.000 winning percentage after getting to 1-0 in the rivalry.

The Tigers and Quakers came into the game at 22-2 between them. They were also both ranked in the top five in scoring defense in the country, allowing fewer than 100 points combined.

They're still in the top five, separated only by 0.4 points per game, with Penn at 50.2 and Princeton at 50.6 (fourth and fifth in Division I). Princeton, though, scored 75 against a Quaker team that had allowed only one team (Duke, with 66) to score more than 55 all season.

There are obviously 13 more league games to go, including a stretch of five in eight days that will include the Penn rematch. And this is a pretty impressive Ivy League in women's basketball right now.

Still, the win sent Princeton off on a high note into exam break. Actually, the wins, plural, as the men and women both had themselves a very good weekend.