Columbia Lions

The Columbia Lions play at Levien Gymnasium on the school's Morningside Heights campus in Manhattan, bringing Division I basketball to the heart of New York City. Columbia's program carries a storied, sometimes turbulent history that includes both championship banners and cautionary tales. The Lions have long recruited against the pull of the city's countless distractions, building teams around discipline and defense. Columbia remains one of the Ivy League's oldest and most historically significant programs.

Columbia has won 13 Ivy League regular-season championships, in 1904, 1905, 1911, 1912, 1914, 1926, 1930, 1931, 1936, 1947, 1948, 1951, and 1968. The 1968 title, won under coach Jack Rohan by beating Princeton in a playoff, propelled Columbia to the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA Tournament. The program's early history also includes Jack Molinas, a record-setting star of the early 1950s whose career ended in a gambling scandal and later a mob-linked murder. Columbia has not won an Ivy title since 1968, making that season the program's last taste of true conference supremacy.