Penn Quakers men's basketball
| Penn Quakers men's basketball | |||||||||
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| University | University of Pennsylvania | ||||||||
| Head coach | Fran McCaffery (1st season) | ||||||||
| Conference | Ivy League | ||||||||
| Location | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania | ||||||||
| Arena | The Palestra (capacity: 8,722) | ||||||||
| Nickname | Quakers | ||||||||
| Student section | Red & Blue Crew | ||||||||
| Colors | Red and blue | ||||||||
| Uniforms | |||||||||
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| NCAA tournament Final Four | |||||||||
| 1979 | |||||||||
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| Pre-tournament Premo-Porretta champions | |||||||||
| 1920 | |||||||||
| Pre-tournament Helms champions | |||||||||
| 1920, 1921 | |||||||||
| Conference tournament champions | |||||||||
| 2018 | |||||||||
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The Penn Quakers men's basketball team is the college basketball program representing the University of Pennsylvania. As the twentieth-winningest men's basketball program of all-time, the team from Penn had its greatest success from 1966 to 2007, a period of over 40 years. Penn plays in the Ivy League in NCAA Division I.
Prior to the formation of the Ivy League in 1956 Penn was a member of the Eastern Intercollegiate Basketball League (EIBL) from 1903 through 1955. Penn won 13 EIBL regular season championships (1906, 1908, 1916, 1918, 1920, 1921, 1928, 1929, 1934, 1935, 1937, 1945, 1953). Penn was retroactively recognized as the pre-NCAA tournament national champion for the 1919–20 and 1920–21 seasons by the Helms Athletic Foundation and for the 1919–20 season by the Premo-Porretta Power Poll.
Penn has appeared in one Final Four, in 1979. Penn and Princeton are tied for the most Ivy League regular season championships with 26 each. Their main Ivy League rivalry is with Princeton, whom they used to always play as the last regular season game. Combining the EIL and Ivy Championships Penn leads with 39 championships; Princeton 32; Columbia 14; Yale 13; Dartmouth 12; Cornell 8; Harvard 6; and Brown 1.
The last NCAA tournament victory for the Quakers came on March 17, 1994, at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale, New York. The No. 11 Quakers defeated the No. 6 Nebraska Cornhuskers, 90–80, in the first round. The Quakers then fell in the second round to No. 3 Florida on March 19 as the Gators prevailed, 70–58.