Ithaca Blog

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Big Red B-Ball Vs. 7-Foot Twins of Stanford

Cornell's men's basketball team makes its first appearance in 20 years in the NCAA post-season tournament today, in a first-round game against Stanford at 5 pm.

Cornell is seeded 14th of 16 teams in its division. Stanford is seeded third.

In academic terms, that would put Cornell in roughly the 80th percentile, and Stanford in the 20th. A big difference.

Stanford's advantage is enhanced by the playing venue of Anaheim, which means a partisan crowd and not much travel time.

The Stanford team has the unusual feature of a pair of 7-foot twins. Cornell's Jeff Foote is its only 7-footer, and in fact the only one in the Ivy League. Two on one team is bad enough, but twins seems unfair. A 7-foot guy circles you a couple of times, and you have to look around to see if it was one guy or both, and where they both are?

So much for our laser-like analysis. The game is 5 pm today, Eastern time.

Steve Burke
for Ithaca Blog

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