By Sam Federman
Penn parted ways with head coach Steve Donahue after nine seasons on Monday, per Kevin Sweeney of Sports Illustrated. The Quakers went 8-19 this season, missing Ivy Madness for the second straight year.
Donahue, a former Fran Dunphy assistant at Penn, returned to University City in 2015 after getting fired from Boston College, a job he got because of his success as the head coach at Cornell - taking the Big Red to a Sweet 16. In his third season, Donahue led Penn to an Ivy regular season and tournament title, making the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2007.
However, Penn has failed to eclipse double digit wins in Ivy play since. The Quakers held a 19-point lead at Jadwin Gym with a share of the Ivy's 2023 regular season title on the line, but blew the lead and lost in overtime, before losing once again the next week to Princeton in the same gym in the Ivy Madness semifinals. After that season, Jordan Dingle unexpectedly entered the transfer portal, and Max Martz had to medically retire from basketball, ushering in a new era of Quaker basketball.
That new era hasn't gone particularly well. Penn went 3-11 in the Ivy League in 2023-24, and then 4-10 this season, as the program has fallen behind longtime rival and peer Princeton, along with Yale and others in the Ivy League.
Penn has lost 13 consecutive games to Princeton, just over seven years since the rivalry scoreboard in the Palestra updated Penn's number. Four consecutive classes of Quaker seniors never defeated the Tigers. Not just that nobody on the 2024-25 Penn team had defeated Princeton, but nobody on the 2024-25 team ever had a teammate who took down Princeton. It's the longest winning streak in the 252 game history of the rivalry, which dates back to 1903.
In Donahue's nine seasons, the Quakers went 131-130.