The Pennsylvania Quakers are the defending Ivy League champions — and they won the title in the most Penn way imaginable: at The Palestra, with their star dropping 44 points in the championship game. The 2025-26 season was a triumph for second-year head coach Fran McCaffery: 18-12 overall, 9-5 in the Ivy League, and then a tournament run for the ages — wins over Harvard and Yale to claim the conference's automatic bid, and a No. 14 seed date with Illinois in the 2026 NCAA Tournament. For a program that treats every season as a chapter in a century-long book, it was a hell of a chapter.
The hero was TJ Power, the senior forward who was named 2025-26 Ivy League Player of the Year after averaging 16.4 points, 7.6 rebounds, and 2.4 assists per game. Power's 44-point explosion against Yale in the Ivy title game instantly entered Palestra lore — the kind of performance that gets talked about in Philadelphia for decades. He returns for 2026-27 alongside senior Michael Zanoni (11.8 points per game), junior guard AJ Levine, senior forward Augustus Gerhart, and sophomore forward Dalton Scantlebury, giving the Quakers one of the league's most experienced cores.
What's happening now is a reload around that core. Penn's leading scorer from the title team, Ethan Roberts, transferred to Notre Dame — and McCaffery answered with a splash of his own, landing Notre Dame wing Sir Mohammed, the rising junior and son of former NBA big man Nazr Mohammed, who showed flashes in limited minutes for the Irish. Sophomore Dorian Glogovac arrives from Division III Cal Tech, and a freshman class — Finley Billy, Chase Geremia, Isaiah Carroll, Johnny Keenan, Ethan Lin, Michael Pereira — adds depth. Cam Thrower (Elon), Dylan Williams (Northwestern), Michelangelo Oberti (Boston University), and Bradyn Foster (Holy Cross) moved on. On October 13, McCaffery and Power will represent Penn at the Ivy League media day, in collaboration with The Field of 68 — the defending champs, front and center.
McCaffery's own story is part of the drama. Hired in March 2025 after Steve Donahue's dismissal, he arrived as Iowa's all-time wins leader — a fiery, veteran coach taking over one of the most tradition-bound programs in America. Year one delivered an Ivy championship and an NCAA bid. Year two is about proving it wasn't lightning in a bottle.
The Palestra is the soul of it all. Opened in 1927 at 33rd and Spruce, it's known worldwide as the Cathedral of College Basketball — split-level seating, banners crowding the rafters, and a century of Big 5 wars echoing off the walls. Wilt Chamberlain, Michael Jordan, and Kobe Bryant all passed through it. Every Penn home game feels like a museum exhibit that happens to keep score, and Quaker fans wouldn't have it any other way.
Penn's own history is championship-caliber, and then some. In 1979, the Quakers reached the Final Four under Bob Weinhauer behind Tony Price — beating St. John's and No. 2 Duke before falling to Magic Johnson's Michigan State in the national semifinal. It's still the most recent Final Four by an Ivy League team, a staggering achievement that grows more impressive with every passing year: a true student-athlete team standing among giants. The program owns 26 Ivy League championships — the league record — including 10 under Fran Dunphy from 1989 to 2006, the most successful tenure in program history.
The 1990s brought more magic: Jerome Allen's squads made Penn the class of the league, and the 1994 team — an 11-seed — stunned Nebraska 90-80 in the first round of the NCAAs with a precision offense that dissected the Huskers. The 2018 Quakers danced again under Donahue, carrying the Ivy banner back to March. And the Big 5 rivalry — Penn, Villanova, Saint Joseph's, Temple, La Salle, plus Drexel — remains Philadelphia basketball's beating heart, the most passionate round-robin in America.
What defines the Quakers is the Palestra and the 1979 Final Four: the cathedral, the last Ivy Final Four team, and a program that treats every game like history. In West Philadelphia, Penn basketball isn't just a team — it's a trust, guarded for nearly a century. The 2026-27 Quakers carry that trust into a title defense with their best player back, their coach's system taking root, and the whole league gunning for them. March showed what they can be. The question is whether they can be it again.
The 2026-27 schedule will test the defending champs from the start — the Big 5 wars never offer a soft landing, and every Ivy gym will be sold out when the team with the target on its back comes to town. But Penn has something most defending champions don't: the best player in the league, a coach who's won everywhere he's been, and a building that makes every home game feel like a coronation. The Palestra has seen a century of Quaker teams. This one has a chance to be remembered among the best of them.