Courtesy of David Schamis

On Feb. 2, 2024, Yale and Princeton — two of the best teams in the Ivy League — played a basketball game in the John J. Lee Amphitheater, or JLA. Though Yale had a home-court advantage and led for what felt like the entirety of the second half, Princeton stayed within a few points of the lead. 

The crowd watched the game’s final minute with a special intensity, erupting every time a Yale player touched the ball and whenever Princeton made a mistake. Except for Yale’s head coach James Jones, who stoically observed the game from a squatting position in front of the scorer’s table, the crowd filled JLA with a constant noise that reverberated off the arena’s four walls in every direction and harmonized like a cathedral hymn. 

With 22.5 seconds left to play, Princeton was down two points and resorted to intentionally fouling, risking made free throws for possession of the ball. Their gamble was unsuccessful. And now that Yale had a comfortable five-point lead with barely any time left in the game, hundreds of fans stood and waved goodbye to the Princeton bench. 

Outside of maybe the Yale-Harvard football rivalry, Ivy League sports do not typically attract significant attention. Only a handful of professional athletes have emerged from its ranks, and even fewer go on to have lasting careers. 

Nevertheless, when students do attend, they file into the six rows of pew-like, slightly orange bleachers behind a line of padded folding chairs on the sidelines in JLA, chanting, yelling and jumping. They exert themselves because they feel they have a stake in the game’s outcome. Yale only has around 6,645 undergraduates, so many fans personally know the players on the court just by virtue of being students and sharing a relatively small campus. 

“That’s John from my English class … Let’s go, John!” Kyle Romans ’27 said at that early February home game against Princeton in reference to John Poulakidas ’25. 

The student section fills up quickly. Thankfully, everyone will always be able to clearly see the court. Despite being a part of the second-largest gymnasium complex in the world and serving as Yale’s home basketball court for 92 years, JLA remains modest. It seats 2,800 people, about the same as it did in 1932. There are no “nosebleed” sections here to obstruct your vision. In fact, out of 363 Division-1 basketball arenas in the United States, only 41 have a smaller seating capacity. 

Its nearly century-long history, however, only partially accounts for its novelty. Plenty of other college basketball arenas are more or less equal in age, and even more have greater cultural significance. 

Look at Duke University’s Cameron Indoor Stadium. Retired jerseys from icons like Grant Hill and Jason Williams hang from its rafters, and the Duke to NBA pipeline remains as formidable as ever, with former Blue Devils making up twenty percent of the 2024 NBA All-Stars. It’s then unsurprising that Duke is a historically prolific spender on basketball, allocating a nation-high $28 million to the sport in 2022. Duke and other “blueblood” schools were early investors in the spectacle of basketball, intent on constructing massive, NBA-like arenas while bolstering their program with the game’s best coaches and staff to earn millions. 

Within this spending frenzy, Yale is unique. It’s an antiquated program with an antiquated home court, budgeting only about $1.5 million to their team. Unlike its D1 counterparts, Yale is a shy participant in the business side of college basketball. 

This is not to suggest that high budgets guarantee success every year or to insinuate that other, less storied programs can never compare to schools like Duke. In fact, if there’s one lesson to learn from this past year’s NCAA tournament, it’s that men’s D1 college basketball is in flux. 

Yale’s run as 2024 Ivy Champions

From JLA’s last row, two players immediately stood out: Princeton’s Xavian Lee and Yale’s Danny Wolf ’26, who has since transferred to Michigan. As an undersized yet fast-paced point guard with a surprisingly adept skill set near the rim and a unique ability to shoot from almost anywhere on the court, Lee quickly became the face of Princeton basketball over the past year.

His counterpart, Wolf, was the tallest player in the Ivy League at seven foot, but like Lee, his style of play does not cleanly match a basketball archetype. He is an elite passer for his size with an impressive knack for shooting from a distance. Fans and analysts alike have regarded them both as NBA prospects. 

A few weeks after the Princeton game, however, Matt Knowling ’24 — not Danny Wolf — would be Yale’s savior. It was the finals of the Ivy League tournament in New York City, an elimination game that determined both the champion of the conference and the recipient of the automatic bid to March Madness. 

It featured a Brown team that started the season with a 6–17 record before going on an unexpected seven-game win streak. They had beaten Yale less than two weeks before and just upset the one-seeded Princeton Tigers. Now, they were one victory away from being crowned tournament champions for the first time since 1986 and the only Cinderella team in Ivy League history. Still, the game felt more like a formality than anything else. Before it even began, the announcers were speculating about how Yale — mainly Danny Wolf — would match up against other D1 programs in the NCAA tournament. 

At halftime, Yale led by four points despite shooting 10 percent from three and 34.4 percent from the field as a team. And, though Wolf already had three blocks and a steal, he had only made one shot so far. Players like Mahoney and Knowling, both with seven points, already assumed a more expanded offensive role, so Wolf was bound to find his rhythm as the other starters drew more attention from Brown’s defense. 

However, with a little over eight minutes to play, Brown’s Kalu Anya barreled to the basket after backing down Yale’s Matt Knowling to give his team a two-point advantage. The last time Brown was ahead was in the first half, when the score was 5–4, and their long-awaited recapture of the lead prompted a cathartic response from Brown’s head coach, Mike Martin, who stormed onto the court, threw his hands in the air and roused the crowd during a timeout. Brown now had full control of the game. 

With one minute left to play, Brown’s Kino Lilly Jr. hit a 15-foot pull-up jumper over Yale’s Bez Mbeng ‘25 to increase the lead to four. Then, about 30 seconds later, Lilly sank two free throws and put Brown up 60-54. ESPN’s analytics gave Brown a 93 percent chance of winning at this point. 

But, with about six seconds left in the game, Yale had cut the lead to within one. On the final play, Mbeng held the ball at the top of the key, switched directions on Lilly, ran towards the basket, and found a wide-open Matt Knowling, who sank a baseline floater as time expired. A true buzzer-beater. After playing a perfect final 20 seconds of basketball, Yale won, 62-61. 

A closer look at Yale

Jackson Thiel ’26, the team’s student manager, sits behind the scorers’ table and explains what is on a piece of paper attached to a clipboard. This is their practice schedule for the day. Between 4:15 p.m. and 6:00 p.m., every minute is accounted for. From 4:15 until 4:20, the team stretches and runs, followed by a drill that lasts from 4:20 until 4:26 and another that starts at :26 and ends at :32. They might start a minute or two late, but the total length of the drill never changes. Jones has become a master of time, precision and consistency. 

He wears his signature Yankees cap and white Under Armour shoes with gold details, maneuvering around the court cat-like between half-court and the sidelines. He rarely raises his voice, but he is always watching. At the top of the clipboard sheet, he’s included what number practice this is — today is No. 97 — the word of the day, “honor,” and at the bottom, their next opponent as well as their prospective win total: Brown, No. 21. 

On the court, Casey Simmons ’26 puts up some shots from the right side of the three-point line. He’s a unique player for a few reasons. Not only is he a shooting guard and a forward, but as one of Yale’s most versatile defenders, he’s gritty, collected and remarkably fluid when he moves on the court. He also began his college career at Northwestern, the fourth-ranked Big-10 University in 2024, before transferring to Yale, meaning that he is the only player on the team to play for both a Power 5 and a mid-major school. 

When asked about the differences between the schools, he first mentioned that “On a Tuesday night, you’re going to play storied schools like Michigan.” This isn’t to say that the Ivy League is less competitive. Centers in the League, for example, might be 6’9” instead of 7’2”, but players like Danny Wolf point to a new trend that Simmons explained: “The talent’s spread out to where — mid-major, high — there’s not much of a difference. The only difference on paper, really, is how much money those programs get.” 

Even Simmons himself, who in high school was the top prospect in the state of Massachusetts and one of the top 100 players in the country as a four-star recruit, is evidence of an Ivy League saturated with a level of basketball talent that you might expect to see only at brand-name D1 powerhouses. To put into perspective exactly what it means to be a player like Simmons, only a few hundred high school players out of a pool of about 500,000 will be given four stars. Even with the most generous estimates, that’s a rate of about 0.06 percent. And still, he comes off the bench. 

These types of players proliferate in the Ivy League. If you look up Harvard’s Malik Mack on TikTok, for example, you’ll find superlatives like “The best freshman you don’t know” and “Top 5 point guard in college basketball” attached to his name. 

As a former winner of Washington D.C.’s Gatorade Player of the Year, Mack averaged 17.2 points this past year, and in one of his best games of the season, he dropped 27 points on outstanding efficiency against Indiana University, the sixth-ranked Big Ten school in 2024. But even with Mack — perhaps the most promising Harvard guard since Jeremy Lin — his team still finished the season as the fifth seed with a 14-13 record. 

Time to Dance: The 2024 March Madness Tournament

Yale entered the March Madness tournament as the bracket’s 13-seed, matched up against an Auburn team that had just obliterated the University of Florida in the SEC championship with a score of 86-67. Their star player — Johni Broome — is a physical juggernaut at 6’10”, 240 pounds, who averaged just over 35 percent from three this season. And under their coach, Bruce Pearl, Auburn secured a Final Four appearance five years ago as well as a number one national ranking in 2022. It was not unreasonable for fans of the tournament to choose Auburn as the tournament’s winner, and it was infinitely less unreasonable to expect them to blow out Yale; according to CBS Sports, the Bulldogs were 13.5-point underdogs. 

By halftime, nothing changed. The announcers were not particularly concerned about an upset. Though Yale was indeed only down by seven points after the first half, Auburn was dominating the paint behind Broome, Danny Wolf had only made one shot, and Yale was committing uncharacteristically careless turnovers. 

But the Bulldogs stayed within striking distance, and with 18 minutes to play in the second half, Poulakidas drained his fifth three-pointer as the shot clock wound down to put Yale within one point of the lead.

The entire bench — except James Jones, who stood with his arms crossed — erupted, holding each other back from taking a step on the court while arms flailed and fingers pointed to Poulakidas. 

About two minutes after Poulakidas’ three, Mbeng drew an and-one foul as he scored a layup to put Yale in front, 46-45. Auburn quickly recaptured the lead. Then, Poulakidas held the ball at the top of the key, ran to the right after Wolf set a screen, and hit a step-back three from well beyond the arc over two Auburn defenders. For the first time since Mbeng’s bucket, Yale now led 73-72. Auburn had numerous chances to either tie or win the game. However, when Samson Aletan ’27 — a freshman who had chosen to play for Yale over Texas — blocked a shot with about four seconds left, he forced Auburn to scramble with no time to organize offensively. Yale won, 78-76. 

The upset triggered an explosion of posts on all social media platforms that night. ESPN, Yahoo Fantasy and Bleacher Report were quick to post graphics and videos featuring Poulakidas’ season-high 28 point performance. 

Nobody in the mainstream world of college basketball — save for the few who chose Yale over Auburn in their brackets, probably just for the sake of having an upset — could have predicted this. But, like Jackson said that night, “We are not a Cinderella.” 

So, what are they?

Yale Men’s Basketball  

For a while, most people probably thought of the spot in the March Madness tournament reserved for the champion of the Ivy League as nothing but an American anachronism, an ode to an era when the oldest universities in the country dominated college basketball before the rapid expansion of the NCAA. But, Princeton’s run to the Sweet Sixteen last year and Yale’s victory over Auburn signify a new identity for Ivy League schools.

Sure, they are not known as basketball powerhouses, but as Jackson said, “The thing to remember is that there was a time when Gonzaga wasn’t. We don’t have a ton of history, but the Ivy League is just good, man.”

Yale was an excellent team this year because of their talent. Their roster was deep enough to the point where any of their starters — whether it was Wolf, Mbeng, Poulakidas or Knowling — could change the course of the game, and elite high school recruits like Simmons came off the bench. But, most importantly, they were excellent because they were cohesive. They care about their craft just as much as the community it fosters. 

Children of coaches and team affiliates often hang around at practice. One time, Yassine Gharram ’25 started teaching one of Assistant Coach Justin Simon’s kids how to dribble two basketballs simultaneously when he was not playing in a scrimmage. The moment the kid learned how to do it himself, Gharram grabbed Coach Simon’s attention, and the two laughed. 

This was likely not the first time Gharram met Coach Simon’s kids. This past season marked his third year at Yale, and like most of his teammates, he will probably spend his last year practicing at JLA, which means another season playing with a relatively consistent roster and intermittently training Coach Simon’s kids during breaks. 

This is not the norm in D1 college basketball today. Usually, at other perennially competitive schools, rosters change dramatically from season to season, both because of one-and-done players who only complete one year at a university before declaring for the NBA draft and because of the ascendancy of Name, Image, and Likeness deals — NIL — since the NCAA authorized them in 2021. 

But, in an era dominated by flux, Yale’s model of basketball relies on long-term building, where highly recruited players like Aletan may not receive much playing time in their first year but have a starting role within a year or two; the team has enough time to gel as a unit. This is what makes the team — and the Ivy League — unique. “We have guys who really could have a right to be upset,” said Thiel. “They might ask ‘Why am I not playing?’ but instead, they’re going to practice every day and working the guys that do play to the point where they are ready.”

Above all else, Yale Men’s Basketball is a team, a clichéd yet rare quality for a program to have in modern college basketball. Like the arena they play in, Yale may not be the flashiest, but they play the game deliberately. They are at their best when they settle into their halfcourt offense, when all five players on the floor work together seamlessly, and when you can see the tangible fruits of multiple seasons of practice with a consistent roster. 

Still, there’s a reason why Wolf transferred to the University of Michigan and why Harvard’s Malik Mack committed to Georgetown in the offseason. And while there may be some personal reasons these players also chose to transfer, two things are certain: the Ivy League still does not garner enough national attention, and it lacks an NIL apparatus. 

One of the biggest contributors to a lack of interest in Ivy League basketball is the highly politicized nature of scheduling non-conference games. Every year, some of the most renowned names in college basketball, like Kansas, Gonzaga and Kentucky, “buy” mid-major programs such as Yale, as Former Director of Basketball Operations Matt Elkin said. They pay the team to play them at their home court, which “in their mind is a guaranteed win.” 

However, Yale does not regularly receive these offers and play these kinds of universities. In fact, despite Yale being only an hour drive from UConn, they haven’t played in a decade. That’s because even if these schools beat Yale, odds are they’ll still qualify for March Madness, and if they lose as UConn did in 2014, the media will harp on how an elite, bonafide program lost to a mid-major university. 

In the mathematics of D1 college basketball, a win wouldn’t be impressive enough to risk a potentially devastating loss, so they simply don’t have an incentive to play. And the same is true even for smaller schools. Elkin explained that after Yale beat Santa Clara this season, the issue is “the money that they lost” and the fact that they “could have bought Dartmouth and won.”

However, it is the players — not the schools — who feel the effects of this most intensely. Since the NCAA announced that players could make money from NIL endorsements and promotions, many have pursued programs where they will be paid the most. This triggered an unprecedented wave of athletes entering the transfer portal. Players such as Bronny James and Jared McCain received $5.9 million and approximately $1 million, respectively. Though these players are exceptions to the rule, even a slim percentage of their earnings is substantial for a college student. 

But schools like Yale simply cannot play brandname programs regularly, meaning their players — as talented as they may be — are trapped within the Ivy League. They cannot generate enough national attention to warrant endorsements because they are rarely allowed.

And the Ivy League is not doing themselves any favors. Because they lack NIL collectives — the independent organizations that exist as the sources of funding for deals — the League sets itself behind its D1 counterparts. It makes retaining its best players an uphill battle as the promise of a Yale or Harvard degree becomes less valuable in an increasingly uncertain job market. So, although NIL deals are driving college basketball’s rapidly changing landscape, they may be crucial for Yale to attract and maintain a consistent roster. 

It might be that transfers will fill limited spots at schools like Duke, thereby allowing Ivy League schools to recruit more elite high school prospects who would have otherwise committed to brand-name programs. But, even if Yale can recruit from an unusually talented pool of players, the increasingly commodified D1 landscape means that they won’t be here for long and that Yale’s model of basketball — as valuable as it may be — might become obsolete. 

The reason this feels like such a frustratingly grim possibility is the fact that schools like Yale are good. Like Jones said after their win over Auburn: “We feel like we can compete with anybody.” What they might not be able to compete with, however, is the remunerative tide in college basketball that’s redefining commitment, fame and the old ideal of finding community within a university.