SMITHFIELD, R.I. – Steadily and without fanfare, Joe Jones has been building Columbia up. Cornell and Harvard have received all the headlines coming out of the Ivy League, but before long Columbia could be getting a lot of them.
The Lions haven’t won a league title yet; in fact, in Jones’ tenure they haven’t had a season where they’ve finished above .500 in Ivy League play. They didn’t do it quickly; Jones is in his seventh season at the helm, and it’s not a league where a team can load up on talented transfers to try a quick fix route. But a look at the team’s progress, and not so much from a wins and losses standpoint, can show the progress.
Jones took over after a 2-25 season that saw the Lions fail to win an Ivy League game. They made an immediate improvement in his first season, going 6-8 in the league, before growing pains led to 3-11 and 4-10 marks. But along the way, Jones assembled good recruiting classes, with his first one being a celebrated bunch at the time that included big men John Baumann and Ben Nwachukwu and point guard Brett Loscalzo, the program’s all-time leader in games started. Before you knew it, he added players like Patrick Foley, who scored the most points in a season by a Columbia freshman in a dozen years, as well as Niko Scott and Kevin Bulger. Now, he has younger talents like sophomore Noruwa Agho and freshmen John Daniels and Mark Cisco.
Those classes have led to three straight 7-7 seasons in Ivy play, which included a 16-12 overall mark in 2006-07. Although the last two seasons have seen them slip back below .500 overall, the Lions appear primed for a better season this time around. They are 5-4 after winning at Bryant on Saturday, and could easily have had a couple of more wins along the way.
“We felt like we had a couple of opportunities,” Jones said, reflecting on tough road losses at DePaul, Sacred Heart and Stony Brook, all by six points or less.
The Lions still have Foley, Scott and Bulger as their senior core. Foley bounced back last season after missing much of his sophomore year with a shoulder injury, although he didn’t practice every day. Scott has had some ups and downs in his career, but has been a consistent starter, and Bulger has never put up big numbers but has been the big glue guy.
Agho surpassed Foley’s freshman scoring numbers last season and is picking up right where he left off from last season. The Ivy League’s leading scorer isn’t just putting up numbers by shooting often, as he’s fourth in the league in field goal percentage (56.7 percent) and is shooting over 64 percent from long range. With Saturday’s 23-point outing (on 9-12 shooting), he has topped 20 points five times this season in nine games after doing so three times all last season.
“He’s playing with so much confidence right now, it’s unbelievable,” Jones said of Agho. “He just makes shots, and the way we try to play, we try to spread it out a little bit, but he’s our guy and he’s just done a great job.”
Injuries hampered the frontcourt last season, forcing the Lions to have to play small at times. Junior Brian Grimes missed the entire season with a knee injury and classmate Asenso Ampim was up and down with injuries. Grimes is now healthy and playing well, leading the team in rebounding, while Ampim has been healthy and contributing off the bench. Daniels starts and Cisco plays key minutes off the bench, and Jones feels like that’s one reason the team is primed for a good run later in the season. With their play, the Lions are tied for the best rebounding margin in the Ivy League.
The remaining non-conference schedule is manageable. The Lions still have to go to Quinnipiac and Lafayette, but both are winnable, and they have Maine, American and St. Francis (NY) at home before Ivy League play starts. It wouldn’t be a complete shock if they ran the table to enter at 10-4, but just going 3-2 for a winning non-league record seems very feasible.
“As long as we defend and rebound and we share the ball on offense, we’ll be in good shape,” said Jones. “We have the talent to do it, and we just got to keep getting our young guys some experience, and this team’s got to continue to come together as a group.”
Jones said his team feels the urgency, especially the upperclassmen, and the young players want to win. The only loss in which they were soundly defeated was at Syracuse, a team Jones was very impressed with, so they’ve been right there. More importantly, a look at this team shows good talent, better than what was there in Jones’ earlier days at the school. Just like the talent upgrade, this team’s good play early on hasn’t received much fanfare, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.
