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NEW YORK — There may come a day when the Ivy League basketball championship is settled with a postseason tournament.
And when that day comes, Columbia head coach Kyle Smith will be a happy man.
“I just think it would be a great event to showcase our guys that pay their way to go to school,” Smith told me Wednesday at practice at Columbia’s Levien Gym. “It would be a great event.”
But until that time comes, the Ivy League remains the only conference in Division 1 that doesn’t determine its automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament with a playoff, making every contest in the league’s 14-game schedule critical.
On Friday, Columbia (15-6, 4-0 Ivy League) will play one of its biggest games in nearly 50 years when it visits Yale (13-5, 4-0) in a game that will be shown on Fox Sports 1 at 5 p.m. Yale has won eight straight, while Columbia is riding a six-game winning streak.
The Lions, who are 4-0 for the first time since 1994, haven’t been to the NCAA Tournament since 1968. On the wall in Smith’s office hangs a framed New York Times clipping from March 6, 1968 with the headline, “Columbia Trounces Princeton, 92-74, for Ivy Title and Berth in N.C.A.A.”
Jim McMillan, a 6-foot-5 forward out of Brooklyn Thomas Jefferson who went on to become the 13th pick in the 1970 NBA Draft, went for 37 points in Columbia’s victory in that game.
“The great thing about [Friday’s game] is you have two undefeated teams, both 4-0 in the Ivies and it’s a great venue,” said former Fordham and Hofstra coach Tom Pecora, who will call the game for FSI. “Yale’s one of the cathedrals of college basketball. Five o’clock tip on Friday, I think the place will be jumping and a good number of Columbia people will be coming up to enjoy the game as well. So I think it’s going to be a great atmosphere.”
There’s still a long ways to go, but Columbia stars Maodo Lo and Alex Rosenberg would love to help New York City’s Ivy League school make the NCAA Tournament for the first time in nearly 50 years.
“Definitely, yeah, that’s the goal every team has and my individual and personal goal as well, to play in the NCAA Tournament before I graduate,” said Lo, a 6-3 senior from Berlin averaging 15.8 points, 3.9 rebounds and 3.1 assists.
Lo, whose mother is German and father is from Senegal, was recruited to Columbia out of Wilbraham & Monson Academy (MA), a prep school that currently features 6-10 Kentucky commit Wenyen Gabriel.
Lo had offers from Siena and Coastal Carolina coming out of prep school, but chose Columbia because it “was most interested.”
Now several NBA scouts have come through the Morningside Heights campus to check on Lo, who scored 14 points against the Spanish National Team while playing for Germany last summer at the World University Games.
“Of course, that’s the goal, that’s the dream [to play in the NBA],” Lo said.
Still, for now Lo is just enjoying the ride.
On Saturday, he and the other seniors experienced their first win at Harvard when fellow senior Alex Rosenberg drained a buzzer-beating jumper to give Columbia a 55-54 win over the Crimson.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ErFQc5-ZZ0]
“People kind of look at me [on campus] and stare but nothing too different,” said Rosenberg, a 6-7 native of Short Hills, N.J. who is really enjoying this season after sitting out all of last year with a Jones fracture in his right foot.
Rosenberg withdrew from Columbia for the year because if he had stayed in school, he would’ve lost a year of eligibility because Ivy League rules do not allow players to redshirt. He interned at a wealth management firm in Midtown Manhattan.
Entering this season, Rosenberg could’ve transferred and spent his fifth year somewhere else, but instead opted to return to Columbia.
“He could’ve done that but he wanted to come back here so I’m always appreciative,” Smith said. “It really didn’t pop into his head, he wanted to finish his career as a Columbia guy.”
Now Rosenberg, like Lo, has visions of the NCAA Tournament.
“It’s something you always want to think about in the back of your mind but this game is everything on Friday,” Rosenberg said. “We’re treating it like we have one game this weekend. We know that this first game means a lot. Once we’re done with that, then we’ll move on to the next one, but Yale’s a tough opponent and obviously they’re 4-0 as well.”
The two teams are slated to meet again on March 5 — the final day of the season — at Levien.
And because there is no conference tournament, it could end up coming down to that final game for a spot in the tournament.
A place Columbia hasn’t been since Lyndon Johnson was in the White House.
“Gotta win the league,” Smith said. “Gotta find a way to win the league. It’s a 14-game tournament, as they say.”
