When an Ivy League Team Had Big Hoop Dreams
With Cornell in the Sweet 16 of the NCAAs, here’s an article I wrote on the 25th anniversary of Penn’s appearance in the Final Four in 1979, the last time an Ivy League team won at least two games in the tournament. It was was published in The Wall Street Journal on March 15, 2004.
By Stefan Fatsis
It is the game hyperbolists say changed basketball forever: Twenty-five years ago, on March 26, 1979, Magic Johnson and Michigan State beat Larry Bird and Indiana State to win the NCAA championship.
It actually wasn’t much of a contest, with Michigan State winning easily, 75-64. But the game in Salt Lake City did draw what is still the highest TV rating ever in the sport. Its leading men did go on to resuscitate the National Basketball Association. And it did usher in a new era: ESPN had its debut in 1979 and began showing the early rounds of the NCAA tourney a year later, while Mr. Bird’s appearance during the event on the cover of Sports Illustrated wearing Nikes was a major moment in the nascent sports-shoe business. “It changed everything,” Sonny Vaccaro, the sneaker impresario who cut the deal, says of that Final Four.
When assessing the happenings of a quarter-century ago, though, the one piece of “everything” observers overlook involves not Magic or Larry or Nike or ESPN or the NBA — all future global touchstones — but another team in the Final Four of 1979: the University of Pennsylvania.
That’s right, an Ivy League team reached the Final Four. It wasn’t the first time. Dartmouth made it in 1942 and 1944, as did Bill Bradley-led Princeton in 1965. But those were different eras. Basketball wasn’t played by as many schools, recruiting wasn’t a cutthroat business, the urban game hadn’t altered the sport. College hoops as we know it really began in the 1970s. (One way to tell: Major basketball-related violations of NCAA rules jumped from 23 in the 1960s to 56 in the 1970s.)
To me, a sports-mad 10th-grader whose oldest brother went to Penn, the Quakers’ march to the Final Four was thrilling. But it wasn’t surprising. Penn had been a national power not long before. The 1970-71 team — whose starting lineup I could recite as a seven-year-old — was undefeated and ranked third nationally before losing to local hoops rival Villanova 90-47 in the NCAA quarterfinals. The 1971-72 team also reached the final eight. Future NBA coaches Jack McCloskey, Dick Harter and Chuck Daly led Penn in the 1960s and ’70s. Digger Phelps, who would become a Notre Dame coaching legend, was a Penn assistant for a time.
In their Final Four run, the Quakers, seeded ninth of 10 teams in the East region, beat Iona, top seed North Carolina, Syracuse and St. John’s. Then came the semifinal game against Michigan State. Penn missed what seemed like a hundred layups, fell behind 31-6 and wound up losing 101-67, an embarrassing footnote to a historic Final Four.
It would be the last time that Penn, or fellow Ivy basketball power Princeton, would advance beyond the tournament’s second round. And that to me is the true legacy of 1979: the marginalization of my alma mater and what it stands for in the mascot-eat-mascot world of intercollegiate hoops.
The decline occurred, as a Hemingway character said of bankruptcy, gradually and then suddenly. In the early 1970s, attending Penn cost around $5,000 a year. While the Ivies then, as now, offered no athletic scholarships, Penn could promise an Ivy education and make up most of the cost in financial aid and campus jobs. “It was not a big stretch for middle-income and lower-income families to see that was a fair trade-off,” says Craig Littlepage, who played for Penn in the early 1970s and coached the team a decade later.
After the Final Four run, that began to change. Double-digit tuition increases pushed the annual price tag to $15,000 in the early ’80s (it’s around $40,000 today), making Penn a stretch for middle-class families. “When I went back as head coach, sitting in front of prospects and parents, the first question night after night was, ‘How much is it going to cost us?’” says Mr. Littlepage, now athletic director at the University of Virginia. “It became a factor that could be conveniently used against us in recruiting.”
At the same time, academically comparable schools like Stanford began developing stronger hoops programs, offering free rides to athletes who might have chosen Penn or Princeton. The formation of the Big East conference in 1979 increased competition for players. Penn, sensitive to criticism that its achievement was due to admitting substandard students, didn’t cut its basketball coaches as much slack with recruits. And the Ivy League itself, skeptical of Penn’s success, in the mid-1980s toughened admissions standards for athletes.
“Each year it became more and more difficult,” says Bob Weinhauer, who coached the Final Four team. He left for Arizona State in 1982, after Penn lost to St. John’s in the first round of the NCAAs. “I didn’t think it was going to be possible to compete outside the Ivy League,” he says.
Mr. Weinhauer’s last Penn team was my first as a fight-song-singing, streamer-throwing undergrad. When he left, we knew times were changing. My sophomore year cratered with a humiliating loss to Dartmouth. The next season: a shocking fourth place in the Ivies. My senior year, the team won the league and made the tournament — with a 13-13 record.
Penn and Princeton have had their share of spotlight moments since then: the Tigers losing by one point to tournament top seed Georgetown in 1989, beating UCLA in round one in 1996, cracking the top 10 in the polls in 1998; the Quakers posting a 25-3 record in 1994, beating Nebraska in the first round that year, earning a No. 21 ranking in 1995.
But the academic cost disparities, the dramatic spending increases by power conferences, the far greater number of revenue-hungry schools building quality teams, the tournament’s growth from 40 schools in 1979 to 65 today — all have made it tougher to compete nationally. In that context, it’s amazing that Penn and Princeton have done as well as they have, scaring if not beating a sports-factory opponent every March.
So while the irrational fan in me wishes the Final Four were still a possibility, the responsible critic of college sports is thankful it isn’t. “It’s not something we realistically believe can happen again,” Penn Athletic Director Steve Bilsky says. Then he laughs. “But we wouldn’t turn down the opportunity.”