Big 5 Basketball: Preseason power rankings for 2019-20 season

3. Pennsylvania

The defending Big 5 champs haven’t been getting the love they deserve thanks to the nationally-relevant squad Tommy Amaker has put together in Cambridge. Harvard received a significant amount of votes in the preseason AP poll, and the attention they’ve gotten has left the Quakers – who probably have a better team assembled than the one that won the Ivy League in 2018 – over-shadowed and largely forgotten about. But make no mistake; Penn will be a serious threat to the Crimson in 2020.

Penn shocked Philadelphia a year ago by beating Nova and going undefeated in the Big 5, but their season took a wrong turn shortly after upsetting Jay Wright’s team at the Palestra for Nova’s first Big 5 loss in six years. Injuries caught up to a Quakers team that already lacked some depth, and they were eliminated in the first round of the Ivy tournament after a .500 league season. But Penn played virtually its entire season last year without leading scorer Ryan Betley, who they’ll have back with former league MVP AJ Brodeur, senior guard Devon Goodman who put up almost 14 points a game from the backcourt in Betley’s absence, and Bryce Washington and Michael Wang who both had impressive stretches as freshmen a season ago.

Penn won’t have the biggest team this year, but they’ve shown that they can beat anyone with Donahue’s careful and calculated xs and os. The addition of Betley will take pressure off of guys like Washington and Wang, who were probably asked to do too much with the holes in the Penn lineup as freshmen, and they’ll have a deep and experienced team that’ll likely be their best since the Fran Dunphy era. It would be shocking if they repeated as Big 5 champs, but Harvard shouldn’t be planning to raise any banners quite yet.