The Preseason Poll

Before TigerBlog gets into today's main subject, he offers a reminder that this evening at 6 the women's soccer team hosts Penn on Myslik Field at Roberts Stadium. 

Princeton and Columbia are tied for first at 2-0-0 in the league. As TB has written, each Ivy women's soccer team is in a stretch where it played this past Saturday, will play a game tonight and then will play again Sunday. 

The Ivy League women's soccer tournament (and field hockey tournament, for that matter) will be held on the second weekend of November. By that time, the college basketball season will have begun, and that brings TB to today's main topic of interest.

The Ivy League released the results of its preseason men's basketball poll. Princeton was the No. 1 selection, getting 15 of the 16 first-place votes to finish with 127 points. Yale was next with 108, though the other first-place vote went not to the Bulldogs but to Brown, who was third with 92 points. 

From there, it went Cornell (67), Columbia (58), Harvard (55), Penn (51) and Dartmouth (18).

Princeton has won three straight Ivy League championships and four of the last seven, by the way. The 2023 Tigers reached the NCAA tournament Sweet 16, as you know.

So what does the preseason poll mean as far as the final standings?

TigerBlog figured he'd look back at the preseason polls and the way the teams finished in the years since the first Ivy tournament, back in 2017. It turns out that the preseason poll is a pretty good predictor of where the teams will finish.

In fact, there's never been an Ivy men's basketball tournament that didn't include at least three of the top four teams in the preseason poll. There have been seven Ivy tournament fields that have been sit (only six were played, as the 2020 tournament was postponed by the pandemic). 

Of the 28 teams in those seven tournaments, all but three were selected in the top four of the preseason poll. That's pretty accurate prognosticating.

Princeton returns two first-team All-Ivy League selections with Caden Pierce and Xavian Lee. When was the last time Princeton returned two first-team All-Ivy picks? TB will give you a few paragraphs to think about it. 

As for the 2024-25 season, Princeton's opening tip will be Monday, Nov. 4, when Iona comes to Jadwin Gym. Just in case you're wondering, Nov. 4 is less than four weeks away. 

Pierce and Lee are working their way up into elite territory on the Princeton career lists. Both are juniors, and both will go past 1,000 career points if they simply match their numbers from last year. 

Beyond that, if you only double their point totals for two years, then you'd have Pierce with 1,486 and Lee with 1,294 — and that doesn't factor in any improvement moving forward. Lee more than tripled his point total from freshman to sophomore year, and Pierce nearly doubled his.

The answer to the All-Ivy question, by the way, is 2005, when Judson Wallace and Will Venable returned after being first-team All-Ivy a year before. When was the last time Princeton had two players who were first-team All-Ivy who returned and then were both named first-team All-Ivy again? You get a few more paragraphs for that one.

Pierce, of course, is a great rebounder. Through two years, he has exactly 500 of them. Only one Princeton men's player has ever reached 1,000 rebounds, and that's Bill Bradley, who finished with 1,008. 

Can Pierce break that record, the same way Ellie Mitchell broke the 50 year old women's record a year ago?  If Lee equals his assist total from last year for his last two seasons, he'd finish fifth all-time at Princeton.

The two are hardly the only weapons Princeton has. Blake Peters is back for his senior year; if he equals last year's three-pointers made total, he'll end up sixth all-time at Princeton. Dalen Davis averaged 10.2 points per game for the final 10 games of last year, with 21 points in 22 minutes in the Ivy tournament against Brown. Deven Austin, who showed what his potential is as a freshman two years ago, is back after rehabbing an injury last year. 

That's a great core for a team picked to win a championship. As always, Jadwin will be a fun place to be this winter.

Lastly, the answer to the second question is Steve Goodrich and Sydney Johnson, who were both first-team picks in 1996 and then again in 1997.