mountainred
Masters Student
Posts: 514
Age: 57
Loc: Charleston, WV
Reg: 04-11-10
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04-18-24 06:36 PM - Post#367586
In response to penn nation
The scenario that gets a second bid is team-based, not league-based. You need a super team that is a lead pipe lock at the end of the regular season. Going back 1985 (when the field expanded to 64) I can see just 2 teams that could have hoped for an at-large bid if they had gagged in the ILT and both times were in the 90's when the league was still essentially Penn and Princeton and hockey schools.
Princeton '98 -- 26-1, a 5 seed and ranked in the top 10. They would have survived an ILT loss. The league was #25 in KenPom that year.
Princeton '91 -- 24-2, an 8 seed and ranked in the top 20; the Tigers were probably still in, but may have been placed in a play-in game (which I know didn't yet exist, but neither did the ILT). KenPom doesn't go back that far, but Yale was the only other league team with a winning record that year.
Penn has earned 11 seeds and several other teams have earned 12's since 2010, but that's the cut line for at-large berths and I doubt any of those teams could have survived one more loss, especially one in March.
Honestly, next year may bring the 2-bid scenario into play. Princeton returns basically everyone and the rest of the league is rebuilding to some degree, so they could run the Ivy table to build a gaudy record. Of course, they will need to survive the non-conference season with 2 losses max, hope their wins are better than this year's (beating Duquesne is likely not enough), and then lose in the ILT to test it out. It's as likely as hitting an inside draw on a straight flush, but 2-bid ivy has always been mostly fantasy.
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