I spent most of my time today reading up on the Elliot Spitzer dirt that I missed spending the past week in Mexico. Now I get my usual job back of depressing the mean quality of this blog.

I also missed the Penn-Cornell game while I was away, meaning I didn’t see Louis Dale and Ryan Wittman play together this year and had to wait for the All-Ivy selections to confirm the obvious: They are becoming Cornell’s version of Ibrahim Jaaber and Mark Zoller, and they’re doing it earlier in their careers than Ibby and Mark did.

Dale became just the second player from Cornell and the second sophomore ever to win the award. Penn had no one on the first team for the first time since 1996-97, when now-Princeton coach Sydney Johnson won his second Player of the Year award with the Tigers. Brian Grandieri got a well-deserved second-team nod. Lastly, congratulations are in order for the outgoing seniors Damon Huffman and Mark McAndrew of Brown and John Baumann of Columbia, who rounded out the first team, although it came at the expense of the supporting cast-less Alex Barnett of Dartmouth.

I must say I’m a bit confused about the honorable mentions. Tyler Bernardini got the only one. There were five honorable mention selections last year, seven the year before that and six the year before that. Anyone know how only one player ends up with an honorable mention?

For the women’s side, Cornell’s track and field moonlighter Jaomi Maduka was the POY, marking the first time the men’s and women’s top players came from the same school since 1999-2000, when Michael Jordan and Dana Caraminico (her second of three straight) won the awards with Penn.

As always, leave a comment with your thoughts on any of the selections.

Tags: awards

This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 11:32 pm and is filed under Ivy League, Men's Basketball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.