It’s fair to say that the Ivy League doesn’t typically get the national spotlight in the college basketball world. That’s why proud Ivy teams like the Brown Bears are easy to overlook. Obviously, as an Ivy League team, cheap Brown basketball tickets are usually plentiful. But the Bears have grown accustomed to fielding competitive teams, especially since the turn of the century. They have become a program that’s on the rise, which explains why last-minute Brown basketball tickets are more in demand than ever before.

A Part of History

There is no denying that Brown has at least some claim to college basketball history. The Bears were participants in the first-ever NCAA Tournament in 1939. The only downside is the Bears lost to Villanova in the national quarterfinals. It also took Brown nearly 50 years to return to the Big Dance. The Bears didn’t play in the NCAA Tournament again until 1986, when they lost their First Round game to Syracuse after claiming the program’s first regular-season Ivy League title.

One of Our Own

After the turn of the century, Brown basketball started to make some positive strides. In 2003, the Bears fell a little short of the NCAA Tournament but earned a spot in the NIT, ending a 17-year postseason drought for the program. One of the players on that team was a four-year starter named Mike Martin, who returned to Brown in 2012 as the head coach of the Bears. Martin led Brown to the CIT postseason tournament in just his second season at the helm. He also won Ivy League Coach of the Year honors in 2019 after guiding Brown to a 20-win season and a quarterfinal appearance in the CBI. It certainly hasn’t been easy for the Bears, but there is a lot of evidence that Brown is poised to be among the top basketball programs in the Ivy League for many years to come, thanks to Martin’s efforts as both a player and coach.