The best basketball nugget today comes courtesy Brian Seltzer's Penn Sports Network podcast, which you can see here. Glen Miller had some very optimistic words for freshman Tyler Bernardini, the kind that go beyond normal coachspeak:

Tyler has a scorer's mentality, and we want him to shoot the ball if he has good open shots. He has to play within himself, but he's maybe the best shooter on our team, so we want to get him in areas of the floor where he can get his shot off.

Whether he starts and plays 25 minutes or comes off the bench and plays 15, that's a sign we could see a lot of Bernardini this year, which I hadn't really expected until now.

The Ivy League preseason media poll was also released yesterday, and Penn was picked to finish third. Can't really argue with Cornell at No. 1 or Yale at No. 2; I guess the only nitpicking I could do is criticize the random first-place votes for Columbia and Brown.

Throw any other thoughts on the poll in the comments section.

Elsewhere, the Inquirer has news about Villanova's lineup.

And in football, the Providence Journal reports on Yale's next obstacle to the Ivy title, and the Hartford Courant does the same. The Register profiles Yale's QB-turned-DE, Brady Hart, and the Crimson offers a good look at ex-Harvard QB Andrew Hatch, who's now at LSU.

The Red and Blue scrimmage certainly was a sloppy one, but with 10 days before the season starts and months until the Ivy League, the team has some time to iron out the kinks.

Other than Harrison Gaines, who sat with a sprained ankle, we also got a first look at the freshman class.

Tyler Bernardini seemed like he was always in the game, hitting some mid-range jumpers early on, but cooling off later. Jack Eggleston, a 6-foot-8 forward, could provide some size down low for this team. He may not have a developed post-up game, but he played solid interior defense, getting a few nice blocks on guys that thought they had an open layup.

The most interesting player to watch was Remy Cofield, not the female rapper Remy Ma, but an athletic 6-foot-4 guard. In warmups he was dunking with ease – he could probably jump high enough to dunk a beach ball if he had to.

In the game he made a couple mistakes – he may not fully understand the offense and didn’t seem as comfortable with the ball as the other guards. But he may have been the most tenacious player out there. He drove at least five times, sometimes getting blocked, but more often fouled. He may be a slight project, but he seems to have to tools to be a good player at some point.

It’s hard to pick out an MVP of the scrimmage, but if I had to give one out, I’d hand it to Cameron Lewis. We know the big man is a threat on the defensive end with his shot-blocking abilities, but he showed some nice post moves yesterday, often yielding him wide open layups.

Other notes:
Glen Miller challenged Justin Reilly for what might have been his shot selection on one play. Seems perfectly normal, but Reilly was on the other team.

The Quaker mascot was there, wearing a Penn jersey. Not sure how Nike feels about that, he was donning one of the old And 1 unis.

The three point shooting was dreadful. If I had to guess I’d say five-to-10 players attempted threes but Darren Smith was the only guy to hit half of his. But even Smith had one glance off the far side of the backboard without touching rim or net.

After that terrible loss at Brown on Saturday, Penn is playing Princeton this week, a team it hasn't beaten in its last two tries. I wouldn't mind a 15-yard penalty after Penn scores its first touchdown. Any excuse to celebrate these days.

Mike Howlett officially became the fourth member of Glen Miller's Class of 2012 at Penn, according to his father, Jay.

Howlett committed to Lehigh last year, but made the "difficult decision" to take a prep year and re-do the process after Mountain Hawks coach Billy Taylor left unexpectedly for Ball State just before school started.

Howlett, whose father said he is "between 6-9 and 6-10," narrowed his list down to Davidson, Bucknell, Holy Cross and Penn, before finally deciding between Penn and Holy Cross. He attends the New Hampton School in New Hampshire and joins Zack Rosen, Rob Belcore and Garvin Hunt in Miller's second recruiting class.

I'll have a full story on this in tomorrow's DP.

You probably heard that Penn has lost its third Ivy League game, and is out of title contention. Or that the Quakers lost their third game of this season to Dartmouth, something they hadn’t done in 10 years. Or that quarterback Robert Irvin’s third year on the team would turn out so bad – throwing seven interceptions, one touchdown and getting medically redshirted because of a re-injured shoulder.

But you may not have recognized how bad the Quakers have been on third down this year. Overall they are 40 for 114, or 35 percent, but that’s even worse than it looks. If you take out blowouts over cake teams in Georgetown and Columbia (a combined 2-14 this year), the Quakers are 25 for 86 on third down for a grand total of 29 percent. In this weekend’s loss they went a dreadful 3 for 15 on third down.

Even more shocking is Penn’s job in the third quarter this year – it has been outscored 37-3. Kicker Andrew Samson ended the 78-plus-minute drought in the third quarter this season with a 43-yard field goal against Yale. The Quakers have scored 0.02857 points per minute in the third quarter this year, as opposed to 0.6952 p/m in the opening quarter.

I guess Al Bagnoli had better pass those halftime speeches on to Ray Priore…

I had thought maybe the change was made as a superstitious thing after a few losses, but for the whole season, the Quakers have worn this on the road, while donning these new ones at home.

“We'll order new away jerseys next year,” Penn coach Al Bagnoli said. “We just went with the home set this year which we needed more, that was the last to be replaced.

“We looked at what we needed, and what we wanted to spend, and instead of getting 300 jerseys, we only got 150, and next year we'll get the other 150 and they'll match.”

The fifth-year senior is the center of every gameplan, and will be again this week coming up against Brown. Bears coach Phil Estes gave Sandberg a lot of love, even more than the usual coach.

“Sandberg is as good as [Yale’s Mike] McLeod,” Estes said. “He has some skills in catching the football, but once the ball’s in his hands, he’s elusive, fast, he can cut on a dime and he can make people look silly. He’s a hell of a football player.”

It has become almost commonplace to consider McLeod the far-and-away number one back and Sandberg the clear second-best. Next to McLeod’s numbers – 1,142 yards and 18 touchdowns in six games – Sandberg’s 589 yards, seven touchdowns in five games don’t exactly stand out.

Clearly McLeod's amazing durability is a virtue, but Sandberg doesn't come close to the Elis' number of carries. With 204 carries, Sanbderg would be on pace for 1,133 yards and 13.5 touchdowns. And he hasn't even been healthy this season. I'd still say McLeod is the better running back, but it's closer than it seems.

And even if he is the second banana, Sandberg still puts fear in the hearts of anyone on the Penn schedule.