ITHACA, N.Y. – The University of Pennsylvania men's basketball team was overrun by Cornell over a three-minute span midway through the second half, and the Big Red never looked back in cruising to an 88-69 win over the Quakers at Newman Arena.
 
Penn led, 56-55, with just under 12 minutes remaining but Cornell scored the game's next 13 points (over a 2:57 span) to go in front, 68-56. The margin never hit single digits after that, and the Big Red used another 8-0 run late to turn a 10-point game into a laugher.
 
Penn fell to 8-8 overall and is now 1-1 in Ivy League play. Cornell remains unbeaten in Ivy play at 2-0 and is now a league-best 12-3 overall.
 
Quaker Notemeal
*Penn saw its five-game win streak in the series with Cornell snapped, and head coach Steve Donahue—who was the Big Red's head coach from 2001-10—fell to 11-2 against his former program.
 
*Penn tied a season high with 19 turnovers in the loss; Cornell had a 27-11 advantage in points off turnovers.
 
*Cornell shot 49.2 percent from the field, the second-best performance by a Penn opponent this season, and was the sixth team to hit double figures in three-point baskets against the Quakers this season (they had 10).
 
*Junior Jordan Dingle scored 21 points to lead all scorers on the night; in the process, he extended his 20-point streak to 12 games and his double-figure scoring streak to 23.
 
*14 of Dingle's points came in the second half; over his last four games, the junior has a 15/76 ratio of first-half and second-half scoring.
 
*Junior Clark Slajchert scored 15 points, extending his double-figure scoring streak to seven games. However, he was limited to just seven shots on the night.
 
*Junior Max Martz kept Penn in it in the first half, scoring 11 of his 13 points before the break. He also had three rebounds and two assists.
 
*Senior Lucas Monroe set a season/career high with seven assists, and also had four rebounds.
 
*Seniors Michael Moshkovitz and Max Lorca-Lloyd led Penn with six rebounds each, followed by Monroe and sophomore George Smith who had five.
 
*Cornell had four players reach double figures in the scoring column, led by Isaiah Gray who had 15. Sean Hansen and Nazir Williams scored 13 each, while Greg Dolan added 11.
 
How It Happened
Hansen got the Big Red out to a good start, draining a pair of treys early to put Cornell up 6-2. However, the period was a back-and-forth affair, the teams trading the lead seven times and tying on four other occasions.
 
Penn went in front 13-8 when George Smith scored on a layup, but Max Watson hit a three and that set Cornell on a 9-2 run that gave the Big Red a 17-15 lead. A Jonah Charles trey put Penn back up, 18-17, but another six-point Red run made it 23-18 for the hosts. That lead held the rest of the half, a Slajchert bucket at the buzzer getting the Quakers within four at the break, 41-37.
 
Keller Boothby opened the second-half scoring with a trey for Cornell, but Penn came back with 10 of the game's next 13 points to tie things at 47-47 just three minutes into the period. Dingle was the catalyst, driving three different times to score, the third of them an acrobatic layup in traffic.
 
Penn went more than five minutes without a field goal after that, hanging around only by getting to the foul line. Cornell wasn't much better, as both teams struggled to score. At the under-12 media timeout, the Big Red's lead was 55-53. However, out of the stoppage Slajchert juked right, then left, then nailed a three-pointer—Penn's first field goal in 5:14—which gave the Quakers a 56-55 lead.
 
Dolan answered almost immediately, and less than two minutes later he drained a three-pointer. Those were the bookends of Cornell's 9-0 run that made the score 64-56 and forced Penn head coach Steve Donahue to call a timeout. No matter: the Big Red scored four in a row out of the stoppage, and suddenly the run was 13-0 and Cornell's lead was 68-56.
 
Dingle finally ended the run—just Penn's second field goal in nearly nine minutes—but the damage was done. The Quakers had another drought of more than three minutes, before a Monroe putback got them within 10 at 74-64 with 4:46 left. However, Ragland hit a three-pointer and that was the start of another 8-0 Cornell run that took just 1:27 of game action and sealed this one.
 
Up Next
Penn continues this true Ivy League weekend with a trip across the Empire State tonight, ahead of facing Columbia tomorrow night in the Big Apple at 7 p.m.