Post by Steve Infanti - An NCAA Tournament bid for the Syracuse men’s basketball team is looking quite unlikely at this point in the season, but Central New York will still be represented in the Big Dance – by Cornell.  Over the weekend the Big Red clinched the school’s first conference title in 20 years and since the Ivy League doesn’t have a postseason tournament, Cornell is the first team in the country to earn an automatic berth in the NCAA Tournament.

Head Coach Steve Donahue has slowly built this program up virtually from ground zero.  The year before Donahue got to Ithaca, Cornell was 10-17 and finished with a 3-11 conference record.  By the time Donahue’s first recruits became seniors, he had doubled that conference win-total and it hasn’t gone down since.  The Big Red is perfect in Ivy League play this season – 12-0.

It’s one thing to make the NCAA Tournament, but the Cornell players aren’t satisfied with that.  They want to win in the NCAA Tournament.  And they keep playing like this, the Big Red just might have a fighting chance.  Riding the momentum of a 14-game winning streak, Cornell is receiving a couple of votes in the AP national rankings.  They could be as high as a 12 or 13-seed – which is much better than having to play one of the nation’s elite teams in the first round like a North Carolina or Memphis.

Speaking of the nation’s elite though, Cornell showed back in January that it can compete against the best.  The Big Red gave Duke all it could handle down in Durham before eventually falling 81-67.  In other words, before you go ahead and fill out your brackets in a couple of weeks – give the Big Red a little consideration and a lot of credit.  The rest of the country is finally starting to see what those of us in Central New York have known all season long … these kids at Cornell can play.