Harvard Earns 2015 NCAA Tournament Bid with Ivy League Playoff Win over Yale

The Harvard Crimson secured their place in the 2015 NCAA tournament following a one-game playoff win, 53-51, over the Yale Bulldogs Saturday evening in Philadelphia. The game decided the Ivy League champion after both teams finished an identical 11-3 in conference play and split their regular-season series.

Crimson guard Wesley Saunders led the way, scoring 22 points on 8-of-15 shooting. Eighteen of those points came in the second half as Harvard erased Yale's 27-23 halftime lead.

With a little over seven seconds left in regulation, Harvard forward Steve Moundou-Missi scored a long jumper to put the Crimson ahead. Yale guard Javier Duren had a chance to tie it at the buzzer, but his layup attempt rimmed out.

After the game, Duren rued what was a golden opportunity to keep the Bulldogs in the contest, per Tim Bontemps of the New York Post:

Moundou-Missi acknowledged that he and his teammates dodged a major bullet, per Pete Thamel of Sports Illustrated:

Saunders, meanwhile, wasn't going to let the close call put a damper on his celebration.

"As a senior class, we talked about what we want our legacy to be," he said after the game, per The Associated Press (via ESPN.com). "We wanted to cement our legacy and come out with a victory."

As Sports Illustrated's Seth Davis joked, it's about time things started going right for the Crimson and their fanbase:

Back on Jan. 24, a conference title would've been unthinkable for Harvard. The team lost 70-61 to Dartmouth and held an unimpressive 11-5 overall record.

Then, it reeled off 11 wins over its next 13 games, culminating with Saturday's victory over its biggest rival.

It's tough to say until the conference tourneys are over what kind of seed the Crimson will be looking at for the Big Dance. Broadly speaking, they'll likely fit somewhere in between Nos. 12 and 14. CBS Sports' Jerry Palm has them at No. 12 in the East Region at the time of writing.

No matter where the team ends up, plenty of college basketball fans will pencil in Harvard as a potential sleeper in the tournament's early rounds.