Ivy Madness at the Palestra: How Harvard, Penn and Yale Rebuilt for a Wide-Open Ivy League Race
Penn returns TJ Power, who scored 44 in last year's title game. Yale lost four starters and added a two-time conference MVP. Harvard bet on continuity. Two Stanford assistants debut at Brown and Dartmouth.
The Ivy League men's basketball season starts this week, and the league's three top-picked teams took three different paths to get here, according to The Harvard Crimson's season preview.
Penn, the 2026 tournament champion, was picked first in the preseason poll. The Quakers are in their second season under Fran McCaffery, who spent 15 years at Iowa and is one of five head coaches to take five different programs to the NCAA Tournament, The Crimson reported. Penn has brought in four transfers over two seasons, led by senior TJ Power, who committed to Duke out of high school, transferred to Virginia, then to Penn, and scored 44 points in last season's conference championship game.
Harvard, picked second for the second straight year, returned four starters and added the league's top freshman, Jason Singleton. "We have to focus on everything that's happening only under our roof," junior guard Robert Hinton said. Harvard went 10-4 in the league and lost to Penn in overtime in last year's tournament.
Yale, picked third, lost three players to the transfer portal and four of five starters, including 2026 Ivy Player of the Year Nick Townsend, who is spending his fifth year at Stanford. The Bulldogs added junior forward Connor May, a two-time conference MVP at Washington University in St. Louis. Coach James Jones ranks second all-time in Ivy League conference wins with 236, The Crimson noted.
Two former Stanford assistants debut this season: Eric Reveno at Brown and Brett MacConnell at Dartmouth. Both come from the coaching tree of Kyle Smith, known for an analytics-heavy approach he developed at Columbia. Smith's former assistants now lead four of the eight Ivy programs, including Columbia and Cornell, according to The Crimson.
The four-team Ivy Madness tournament will be played at Penn's Palestra, which marks its 100th anniversary this season. The winner takes the league's automatic NCAA bid. That means the regular-season title is not enough, a lesson Harvard learned last spring.
In CollegeInsider's Mid-Major Top 25, Penn is sixth, Harvard 12th and Princeton 20th.
For Boston-area fans, Harvard is the Ivy team to watch, starting tonight against MIT at Lavietes Pavilion. Harvard faces Boston College in mid-November and Duke on Dec. 4. The Ivy schedule starts in January.
