Most are probably under the impression that Cornell is locked in some sort of traumatic stupor these days. It’s certainly been a rough semester for the students on Ithaca’s East Hill. Even looking past the awful, tragic deaths that have plagued the campus of late, Cornellians have had a rough time of it — especially in the court of pubic opinion, where they have suffered a rash of unfavorable media attention. Also, effing Andy Bernard.

Still, amidst all the badness, there’s at least been one unequivocal bright spot: the men’s varsity basketball team, who just received their third NCAA Tournament bid in as many years. The 12th-seeded Big Red are poised to face off against the Eastern region’s number five seed — the Temple University Owls — in Jacksonville this Friday. This to cap off a historic season that saw Cornell become the first Ivy League team to crack the national rankings in over a decade.

What’s been the secret to the Red’s success?

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There’s about a 10-percent chance that an Ivy Leaguer is headed to the NBA next year. Senior Jeremy Lin of Harvard, along with Seniors Jeff Foote and Ryan Wittman of Cornell have all accepted invitations to compete in an NBA pre-draft invitational tournament at which 200 NBA managers and scouts will be watching closely.

The tournament, which originated in 1953, will be taking place April 7-10 at Churchland High School in Portsmouth, Virginia. Suitably, it’s called the 2010 Portsmouth Invitational Tournament. For four days, the players will compete in a 12-game tournament while simultaneously crossing their fingers behind their backs, searching for four-leaf clovers and rubbing rabbits feet. In the past, the tournament has kick-started the professional careers of players like Dennis Rodman and Scottie Pippen. Last year six players from the tournament were selected in the draft; so basically Lin, Foote and Wittman will only have to be better than the 58 other amazing basketball superstars to get the job they’ve always been dreaming of. Well, good luck, boys!

How the mighty have fallen. The Cornell basketball team, which was previously unbeaten, was trounced by Penn, 79-64, last night at the Palestra. This game was a David vs. Goliath matchup, as Penn entered the game with a 3-15 record (2-2 Ivy), but the Quakers took a one-point lead into halftime and never looked back. Junior Jack Eggleston (pictured) led all scorers with 24 points and sophomore Zack Rosen chipped in with 22 of his own. Big Red seniors Louis Dale and Ryan Wittman each had 16 points and senior Jeff Foote contributed a double-double in the losing effort.

The Big Red rose to No. 22 in the ESPN/USA Today rankings this week, but will likely fall out of the top 25 with the loss. Tomorrow night Penn will try to earn a weekend sweep as it takes on Columbia. There will be no rest for the weary Big Red, as they must travel to Princeton to take on the only remaining undefeated team in the Ivy League.

Our sports analyst Matt Velazquez tells us what’s up in the NCAA, where an Ivy League team, somehow, got nationally ranked.

With unbeaten Ivy records and impressive nonconference wins, Cornell and Harvard were set for a clash of the titans this past Saturday at Newman Arena in Ithaca—or so we thought. What actually happened was an assertion of dominance from the two-time defending Ivy champion Big Red, as it drubbed the Crimson, 86-50, in front of a sell-out crowd.

All five of Cornell’s starters scored in double digits, led by center Jeff Foote who contributed 16 points and fell just one rebound shy of a double-double. Probably more impressive, though, was that the Big Red defense held the Crimson to just 50 points while forcing 25 turnovers. Harvard standout guard Jeremy Lin was the lone bright spot for the Crimson as he turned in 19 points, but outside of Lin, the Crimson shot just 25.9 percent.

In decimating Harvard—the only other team legitimately expected to challenge the Big Red for the Ivy League title—Cornell made a statement not just to the league, but the college hoops world as a whole. After beating Alabama, Davidson, St. John’s and UMass and narrowly falling to No. 1 Kansas in its nonconference schedule, Cornell had built up a strong RPI (Relative Power Index) going into its game against Harvard.

By winning in such dominant fashion the Big Red’s RPI rose to the 33rd-best in the country and effectively vaulted them to greater national recognition. In this week’s ESPN/USA Today Coaches Poll, the Big Red earned its first ranking in 59 years entering the poll at No. 25. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Coaches Poll, it is made up by a panel of 31 Division I coaches who decide on the top 25 teams in the country. Cornell received 53 points, edging out Mississippi (52 points) for the final ranked spot for this week.

The last Ivy League team to be ranked in a national poll was Princeton during the 1997-1998 season. That year, the Tigers finished ranked No. 8 in the AP Poll and No. 16 in USA Today/NABC Poll. Currently, the Big Red is not ranked in the AP top 25, as it sits on the outside at No. 27.

Despite the fact that the Ivy season is still very young and there remains another unbeaten team in the league (Princeton), it seems like a foregone conclusion that the Big Red will reach the NCAA Tournament for the third successive year. Through four league games, Cornell’s average margin of victory is 29.25 points. Put simply, this team is scary good.

Yup. Tune in Tuesday when our sports columnist will cover the implications of the win and Cornell’s potential ranking for March Madness.

Time notes that it’s unusual that any Harvard hoops star getting national attention is particularly rare. But Jeremy Lin is doubly a special case.

There’s a chance Lin might take Harvard to the NCAA tournament! (Time, wisely, makes no guarantees.) We’ll leave it to the magazine to crunch numbers, as we thought Yao Ming’s arrival on the scene meant a critical mass of Asian basketball stars was coming soon:

Fewer than 0.5% of men’s Division 1 basketball players are Asian-American. Sure, the occasional giant from China, like Yao Ming, has played in the NBA. But in the U.S., basketball stars are African Americans first, Caucasians second, and Asians … somewhere far down the line.

The magazine also lists some impressive stats — for an Ivy or a Big Ten school! Lin has 18.1 points per game on average, Harvard’s top record. Somewhat troubling, though, is the ethnic taunting that Lin has faced:

I’ve heard it at most of the Ivies if not all of them.

…Lin tells the reporter which, um, doesn’t surprise us). He seems very calm about it though — which possibly can be credited to his Christianity. (Apparently, he wants to be a pastor post-grad.) An uncynical Ivy League student?! That’s rarer than an — oh, wait.

After the jump: Jeremy Lin’s impressive dunk (or lay-up?) against Santa Clara.

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Even over holiday break, sport marches on in the Ivy League — and not just for those of us skiing at Aspen (we lost our invitation this year, otherwise we’d be there with you all!).

The Pennsylvanian reports that three seniors have been reinstated to the wrestling team after an arrest subsequent to an “October 3 incident” that the Pennsylvanian is too genteel to disclose. We’re not! Nor was the Hartford Examiner, which reported that the three wrestlers had been arrested for aggravated assault and reckless endangerment and that they might well be “among Penn’s best matmen.” Their suspension had been for “violation of departmental policy,” an issue settled just in time for the Southern Scuffle tourney.

How lucky that, as the Pennsylvanian implies, the wrestlers’ most recent court appearance was moved up so that their case could be dismissed in time for the tournament. So many things we’ll never understand about wrestling! And we saw the Mickey Rourke movie, even.

After the jump, deep analysis and a video of Mickey Rourke shopping for lesbians.

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A confession: The current editors of IvyGate are an effete crew of muscle-atrophied weaklings. As such, we have no way of evaluating the content and/or accuracy of the Sun’s NCAA basketball blog, though we find the graphic design on the top banner quite nice. (If any of your more robust Ivy Leaguers are interested in sportswriting, do drop us a line!)

Luckily, Insider Higher Ed has created the only March Madness bracket we are capable of understanding, one that pits brains vs. brains and forgets the brawn! In “A Bracket Not to Bet On” IHE crunches each team’s academic stats via some complicated voodoo known as “math” (yeah, we’re not too good at that, either — thank god for the Humanities) and finds that Cornell would make it to the Final Four, if only smart points could be swapped for athlete points. And oh, what a voodoo that would be, one that I wished for daily in middle school gym class but, alas, never arrived.

A few surprises: Due to the team’s (not the school’s) smart points, Cornell beats Stanford straightaway, then trounces Marquette. Davidson goes further than anyone expects, and Vanderbilt drops out early.

IHE’s complete academic bracket is downloadable on their website, or visible on our website, after the jump.

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Hey, remember when we wrote the other week about Harvard’s unconscionable number of black coaches — y’know, zero — out of 41 head coaching positions? All better!!! The Crimson last week hired Tommy Amaker, who is black, to lead its men’s basketball program. Given that the last African-American to hold the title left 16 years ago, we can look forward to equitable representation in December 2071. (We think that math is right.)

Actually, the real news is that Amaker comes to Cambridge from freaking Michigan, which must make it feel like the rims are set at an elementary-school eight feet. How ever did Harvard land him? Amaker’s shit performance in Ann Arbor (no tourney berths in six years) certainly has something to do with it, but the truth is much simpler: a fat paycheck. A very reliable source tells us Amaker will make $225,000 a year; at Harvard, that works out to about $20,000 per win.

Who’s the happiest team in college basketball right now? UNLV, thrilled to be the lowest seed still alive in March Madness? Ohio State, still giddy from their improbable last-second comeback against Xavier?

Not a chance. It is good to be a Princeton Tiger tonight, as coach Joe Scott will announce at 5 p.m. tomorrow that he’s leaving the flaming wreckage of his program to take the top spot at Denver. What’d he accomplish while in town? As the Princetonian explained last week in a piece about widespread demands for his head on a pike:

Against Monmouth on Dec. 14, 2006 the Tigers scored just 21 points — tying the Division I record low for a game since the inception of the three-point shot. Just two weeks later, Princeton fell to Carnegie Mellon, the first defeat at the hands of a Division III program in school history. And this season, Princeton did the unthinkable, falling to last in the Ivy League for the first time ever.

You may remember Scott from our January post about the teensy li’l issue of his players hating him so much they left the team — eight of them over three years. (And you may have noticed we don’t have any Princeton ads up in this piece anymore, butthat’sallwe’regonnasayaboutthat.) We have to admit, part of us is sad to see Scott go; we were hoping to dine out on him and Harvard’s Tim Murphy as a kind of batshit coaching duet for years to come. Alas, alack, we’ll have to find another clipboard-wielder to hate on. Goodnight, Joe Scott. You were too beautiful for this world.

(Princeton’s on spring break right now, but we’ll update with reactions when we get ‘em.)