In case you were worried that Penn Athletics was only focusing on marketing the men’s basketball team, the women’s basketball team is also receiving the wisdom of Nelligan Sports Marketing.

Against Drexel Dec. 19, the team will attempt to set an all-time attendance record for a home game as part of the yearly “Pack the House” Challenge. Part of the campaign also includes getting school groups to come to the Palestra — a necessity, since the game is during winter break.

Of all the women’s basketball games I’ve been to, the most spectators I’ve ever seen is about 200. So there’s certainly a lot of seats to be filled in the Palestra. Also it’s interesting that both the women’s and men’s games against Drexel this year are part of NCAA-wide gimmicks. The men’s team will play at Drexel for the first time ever, and it’ll be at 10 a.m. as part of ESPN’s 14-hour hoops marathon.

Here are two other Random Ivy notes:

1) Ivysport.com, which for the most part is a site that sells Ivy League apparel, has an “infopedia” on the Ivy League. Most of you probably already know the vast majority of what’s on this site, but in case you ever want to find out which Ivy League school doesn’t have a Latin motto (Cornell), or you want to see a good timeline of Ivy League history, this is the site for you.

2) Pumped up for college basketball after The Line?  Well here’s a reason to like every single basketball team in America.  Penn’s reason:

Glenn Miller has himself a deep rotation. Darren Smith and Tommy McMahon missed last season. Zach Rosen leads the recruiting class that’s pretty awesome. Harrison Gaines has an awesome rich man name. And the Quakers have four returning starters. Flat out.

A blog dedicated to  Columbia football — yes, the same Columbia football team that is currently on a 12-game losing streak — just wrote a post about Al Bagnoli and the quick turnaround of the Penn football team he masterminded in the early 1990s.

But as Quakers fans know, the last four years have brought zero Ivy League titles and three straight losing Ivy campaigns. Why the decline?  Well, according to the post, maybe Penn President Amy Gutmann is to blame.

But 2003 was the last time Penn won the football title. And that’s also when current Penn president Amy Gutmann came on the scene.

Could the two incidents be related? When I asked Bagnoli last year if he felt he was getting enough support from the administration, he mostly shrugged. I get the feeling he had more to say … but couldn’t.

And then later:

For all I know, Gutmann is supporting athletics more than anyone at Penn, but the time parallels here are pretty clear. This is not only the longest championship drought for Bagnoli, his Quaker teams have had three straight losing Ivy seasons! And basketball fell off a cliff in 2007-08 for the first time in… forever.

Oh, and quarterback Robert Irvin is also to blame, says the blog, despite the fact that he was injured for all but 1.5 games last year and performed well in his sophomore season when he earned honorable mention All-Ivy honors.

Although this post is more than a little suspect — Gutmann surely can’t be blamed for Penn’s football woes — the blog, Roar Lions Roar, actually does have some legitimate information. Some links of note for Penn fans:

Will Lions WR Austin Knowlin have a big game on Saturday?

Is there a rivalry between Penn and Columbia?

Scouting Penn

Similar to Storming the Floor’s ranking of each state by overall winning percentage, CollegeHoops.net has a state by state ranking of each D-I men’s basketball program. The rankings are based mostly on the last five years’ results, not on upcoming predictions.

In Pennsylvania’s ranking, Penn came in a respectable fifth. The top four were Pittsburgh then Big 5 members Villanova, St. Joseph’s and Temple, in that order. Besides those last three schools, the Quakers will play four other teams from Pennsylvania: No. 7 Drexel, No. 8 Penn State, No. 12 La Salle and No. 13 Lafayette.

The only top-ranked school Penn will play this year is UNC, who edged out Duke for tops in North Carolina.

After the jump, the rankings of the other Ivy League teams

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Don’t know how this one fell through the cracks, but director Kevin Rafferty submitted a film about the infamous 1968 football game between Harvard and Yale that ended in a 29-29 tie to the Toronto International Film Festival last month. Here’s a review of the film.

With the first official basketball practices just a few weeks away, here are some Penn basketball notes.

1) Here’s the Sporting News’ preview of the Ivy League. It’s not that different from Athlon’s or Lindy’s, as Penn is selected second behind Cornell.

(HT The Cornell Basketball Blog)

2) ESPN analyst Andy Katz writes about ESPN’s college hoops marathon on Nov. 18, including the Penn-Drexel game at 10 a.m (The relevant paragraph is about one quarter of the way down.)

3) Storming The Floor ran an interesting series that ranks the 36 states with at least three D-I basketball programs by combined winning percentage of the teams in that state.  Pennsylvania comes in 17th with a .524 winning percentage. Each state’s page also has other categories, and Penn earned the best venue (no surprise there) and recognition as STF’s Favorite Program from Pennsylvania.

Even though I’m posting these links as they come instead of every Wednesday, I actually have some today.

1) The first concerns the College of New Jersey Princeton. In a fascinating coincidence, two of the most accomplished Princeton athletes of all-time — basketball legend Bill Bradley and football star Dick Kazmaier — both wore number 42 on their jersey. Although 42 has been unofficially retired from the football and basketball teams, the number will be uniformly (no pun intended) retired for all Princeton athletics teams in a ceremony on Oct. 24.

Bradley, a former U.S. senator and Presidential candidate, took the Tigers to the 1965 Final Four and earned National Player of the Year recognition that same season. Kazmaier, meanwhile, won the 1951 Heisman Trophy and Maxwell Award as a member of the Tigers.

2) With the Major League Baseball playoffs starting today, here’s a trivia question: Who is the only active MLB player who is a former all-Ivy League quarterback? If you answered former Penn student Mark DeRosa of the Cubs, you’d be correct. In fact, DeRosa is the only current Major Leaguer who graduated from Wharton. Here’s a profile The New York Times did on the 1996 Penn grad who played both baseball and football for the Quakers.

UDPATE: The Inquirer also did a piece on DeRosa. (HT Jonathan Tannewald, of Soft Pretzel Logic.)

3) The biggest news story recently has been the financial crisis.  Not too surprisingly, three people critical to our economy’s recovery have Ivy connections. But what you might not have known is that one of the three — Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson — was a Dartmouth offensive lineman. ESPN.com’s Ivan Maisel dedicated part of his I-Formation column today to Paulson’s past football exploits. (It’s the fifth item on the right side.)

• New Hampshire 42, Dartmouth 6
• Brown 24, Harvard 22
• Cornell 17, Yale 14
• Towson 31, Columbia 24
• Princeton 10, Lehigh 7

And if you need something to distract you from Penn’s loss in Easton yesterday, look in today’s and Tuesday’s DP for analysis of Penn wrestling coach Zeke Jones’s resignation.

Wait — less than two months before the season, the coach of one of Penn’s better programs leaves town?

Surprised?

So was I.

The Harvard men’s basketball team might have been cleared of any wrongdoing in recruitment, but coach Tommy Amaker is back in hot water.  According to a New York Times article, Amaker recently cut five players, including all three of the team’s sophomores. Most importantly, all of the five were recruited by his predecessor, Frank Sullivan.

Now, in any Division-I conference except the Ivy League, this wouldn’t be that big of a deal (or so says the Times).  But besides going against the spirit of the Ivy League, Amaker did this in one of the worst ways possible.  Instead of making the cuts either in the spring or summer, which would have given the players a chance to transfer to another school, he waited until they had registered for fall classes. Furthermore, he didn’t even give them a chance to compete for their spots this year. In fact, the three sophomores who were kicked off all started at least one game last year, yet they were shown the door — presumably just to make room for Amaker’s own recruits.

This forced exodus isn’t breaking any rules.  But for the second time in the past year, Amaker’s management of the team has clearly been questioned.

In the past few weeks, I’ve had a lot of seemingly random posts, ranging from connections of the Ivy League to the NFL, to Cornell’s basketball team as the best ever to Ivy League hoops previews that are two months early.

But starting today, I’m going to try something a little different. From now on, I’ll collect these randomly related Ivy League and/or Penn links that aren’t time sensitive and post them each Wednesday. And any story with a more direct news link, such as Cornell’s Adam Gore tearing his ACL or analysis of the just-released men’s basketball schedule, will get posted ASAP.

So without further ado, here’s the first couple of links:

1) In honor of Yankee Stadium closing Sunday night, Jim Caple, of ESPN.com’s Page 2, ranked “America’s 100 most important sports venues.” The title is pretty important, because Caple specifically states it’s neither the best venues nor his favorites, and it’s not just stadiums (ESPN’s headquarters comes in at No. 10).

Penn gets on the list twice. The Palestra comes in at No. 34, while Franklin Field makes the cut at No. 71. (The Palestra actually gets one of the few photos.) ESPN praising Penn athletic facilities isn’t anything new, but it’s still nice to see our stadiums mentioned on the most-read sports website. The only other Ivy venue is the Yale bowl, and Penn is one of just two universities to have both on-campus football and basketball venues listed (Tennessee is the other).

2) This might be a month old, but if you’re sad that the Penn football team just lost its fifth overtime game in its last 16 contests, just remember, at least you don’t root for Columbia.