THEDP.COM | THE DAILY PENNSYLVANIAN
SPORTS 23
FRIDAY, AUGUST 24, 2018
FRIDAY, AUGUST 24, 2018 VOL. CXXXIV NO. 32
THE INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
8 schools 10 years:
FOUNDED 1885
ranking the success of the Ivy League’s athletic programs
JONATHAN POLLACK Senior Sports Editor
Editor’s note: Welcome to the first article in what will be a semester-long series on the state of Ivy League athletics over the past decade. Over the summer, Cole Jacobson, Sam Mitchell and I set out to chronicle how each team at each school performed in the past 10 years. In this series, we’ll be highlighting some of our results, starting with overall rankings of all the schools. In the coming weeks, we’ll look at the best individual teams, Penn’s place in the Ivy League, and much more. Each new article will shed light on a specific topic we find intriguing and insightful. Thanks for reading, and enjoy! — Jonathan Pollack Methodology This is a condensed version of the methodology and terminology used in this study. For the complete version, please visit our methodology report online at thedp.com. We considered all sports where at least half of the Ivy League competes at the varsity level. This means that we did not include certain sports in which only a few Ivies compete, such as sprint football, skiing, men’s volleyball, water polo, etc. We took data from the past 10 complete school years going back to 2008-09. We saw this as an appropriate compromise between being large enough to have a sample size indicative of which schools were best, yet small enough to reasonably demonstrate which programs are the best right now. For sports where some Ivy teams don’t compete, each team’s finish was mathematically adjusted to a hypothetical finish on an eight-team scale, with the first-place team remaining at 1 and the last-place team finishing 8. Ivy League titles were split into outright and overall titles to account for shared titles. In the case of a shared title, each team that earned a part of the Ivy title was given a championship. We felt it was important not to have any ties in our study, as it would have made our analysis much more complex. The general tiebreakers, in order, are head-to-head results, Ivy Tournament seeding, Ivy point differential, head-to-head point differential, and RPI. Several sports required sport-specific tiebreakers that replaced the general tiebreakers. Premiere postseason appearances, wins, and national titles refer to the NCAA Championship or Tournament, or each sport’s equivalent of that. Here are our rankings of the eight Ivy League athletic programs. No. 1 — Princeton Princeton clearly was the most successful school in the Ivy League over the last decade. On top of an average finish that’s nearly half a place better than the next best school, the Tigers had the most Ivy titles, Ivy postseason titles, NCAAs appearances, and top 25, 10, and 5
finishes. Princeton dominated in several sports, with nine teams earning the top average finish in their respective sports, but that’s not all that made the Tigers the best in the conference. Princeton most impressive feature is that it was competitive in almost every sport. 29 of Princeton’s 33 teams took home an Ivy title in the last 10 years, with all but two of those 29 teams winning at least two titles. The Tigers averaged a top-four finish in 25 sports, and their worst overall finish was just 5.2 — just 0.1 less than Dartmouth’s overall average. With a few standout teams and all-around above average performance, Princeton easily earned the top spot. No. 2 — Harvard Right behind Princeton as an elite Ivy League athletic program is Harvard. The Crimson are clear second fiddles to the Tigers, but still stand head and shoulders above the rest of the league. While it placed second in average finish, Ivy titles, and NCAA appearances, Harvard had the most national titles in both the team and individual categories. This was largely due to the sheer dominance of its women’s squash team, which racked up seven team titles and six individual championships. Harvard’s average finish might actually undersell how close they are to Princeton. The Crimson had a median finish of 3.2, well below their average finish, indicating they were dragged down by a few poor finishes. Most notably, the three men’s running teams — cross country, indoor track and field, and outdoor track and field — averaged finishes of 6.4, 4.7, and 5.1 respectively. With 26 out of 33 sports earning at least one title and 12 different teams grabbing the top spot in their sport, Harvard, much like Princeton, was competitive in almost every sport. No. 3 — Cornell Moving on to the middle tier of Ancient Eight, Cornell takes third place behind a few dominant teams along with many that were solidly in the middle of the pack. Cornell wrestling is perhaps the best individual team in the entire study — the Big Red captured all 10 Ivy titles, nine ECAC titles, and 10 individual NCAA championships. SEE IVY LEAGUE PAGE 25 GILLIAN DIEBOLD | DESIGN EDITOR
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Watson impresses in NFL action
Penn’s hire of Wieland a positive step
Halfway through his first NFL preseason, the former Penn star wide receiver has a strong chance to make an NFL active roster.
“The addition of Dr. Wieland will be instrumental to consolidating the responsibility and accountability for the well-being of student-athletes.”
Sports Editor Theodoros Papazekos
The Sports Department
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