QUICK HITS
• The Cornell men's basketball will end its season-opening stretch where it played five of its first six games on the road when it heads to unbeaten Houston on Saturday, Nov. 26 at 4 p.m. CT at Hofheinz Pavilion.
• The game will be available live on ESPN3, with Barry Leonard on the call locally on 96.3 FM The Buzzer.
• Cornell men's basketball is making its second trip to the Lonestar State in 118 varsity seasons.
• The Big Red's lone previous trip to Texas came when it dropped a 67-59 decision to SMU on March 6, 1989.
• The trip will serve as a homecoming for Big Red senior guards Robert Hatter (Westside HS) and Desmond Fleming (College Park HS), as well as an in-state trip for sophomores Joseph Bayless (Dallas) and Jack Gordon (Dallas).
• The Big Red is coming off a 76-61 loss at Monmouth on Nov. 22 despite a career-high 14 points from sophomore Troy Whiteside.
• Sophomore Matt Morgan leads the Big Red in scoring (15.2 ppg.) and steals (1.2 spg.) and second in rebounding (6.0 rpg.) through five games.
• Morgan was the nation's fifth-leading freshman scorer in the country a year ago (54th overall) and broke the conference's rookie scoring record after a 2015-16 campaign that saw his average 18.9 ppg.
• Senior guard Robert Hatter, the league's third-leading scorer a season ago, is posting 11.2 points, 4.8 rebounds, 2.0 assists and 1.2 steals and is 39 points shy of becoming the school's 26th 1,000-point scorer.
• Sophomore Stone Gettings has shown to be one of the most improved players in the Ancient Eight, averaging 14.0 points, 6.2 rebounds and 3.4 assists in five games, significantly up from last season's 2.1 points, 1.8 rebounds and 0.3 assists per night.
• Sophomore Donovan Wright exploded in a return to his hometown with a career high 26 points on 8-of-10 shooting from 3-point range in the win at Lafayette after opening his career with 11 points and 0-of-2 shooting from beyond the arc in his first three contests.
• Freshman Josh Warren has proven to be a reliable option in the frontcourt (4.2 ppg., 5.0 rpg.), while senior Darryl Smith (4.7 ppg., 3.3 rpg.) and sophomore Troy Whiteside (4.2 ppg.) have found roles off the bench in the backcourt.
• Senior JoJo Fallas has started four straight games and is averaging 4.8 points while shooting 40 percent from 3-point range.
• Senior David Onuorah has missed the last four games due to illness, but ranks among the school's all-time leading shot blocker (119).
• First-year head coach Brian Earl, one of the greatest players in Princeton basketball history, served as assistant and associate head coach at his alma mater and helped his program to a 143-69 overall mark, a 72-26 league mark and five postseason appearances since the 2009-10 season.
• Earl, the 1999 Ivy League Player of the year and a three-time Ivy champion, graduated with an Ivy League-record 281 3-pointers, a mark that stood until Cornell's Ryan Wittman '10 surpassed him in 2010, and closed his career ranked fifth all-time at Princeton with 1,428 points.
• In all, the Big Red returns better than 97 percent of its minutes, points, rebounds and assists from last season.
• Cornell enjoyed a 10-day foreign trip to Spain in August, going 3-0 and getting a chance to bond with its new coaching staff.
• A pair of sophomores played big roles during the team's trip to Spain, with Gettings (9.3 ppg., 4.3 rpg., 3.3 apg. in Spain) and Whiteside (7.0 ppg., 5.3 rpg.) showing that they likely will play more significant roles in the lineup in 2016-17.
• Cornell played outstanding defense throughout its three-game foreign tour, holding opponents to 61.3 ppg., while shooting 30 percent from the floor and 25 percent from the 3-point arc.
• Houston is a perfect 4-0 and champions of the Gulf Coast Showdown after a 72-71 buzzer-beating victory over Vermont on Wednesday night.
  • Cornell head coach Brian Earl is in his first season at Cornell (1-4, .200; 0-0 Ivy, .000).
• Earl became the sixth Robert E. Gallagher '44 Coach of Men's Basketball at Cornell on April 18, 2016.

ABOUT HOUSTON
• Houston is a perfect 4-0 on the season after sweeping through the three-game Gulf Coast Showdown, including a 72-71 buzzer-beating win over Vermont in the championship game.
• Houston also owns wins over Morgan State (93-52), George Mason (93-56) and South Dakota (83-58).
• Rob Gray leads four double figure scorers at 19.8 ppg. to go along with 3.8 assists, 2.8 rebounds and 1.0 steals per game.
• Damyean Dotson (14.5 ppg., 5.3 rpg., 1.3 spg.), Danrad Knowles (13.5 ppg., 4.5 rpg.) and Devin Davis (11.3 ppg., 9.0 rpg., 2.0 apg.) are also in double figures.
• Wes Vanbeck isn't far behind at 9.3 ppg. and has connected on 60 percent of his 3-point shots (9-of-15) to go along with 17 assists and just three turnovers, while Galen Robinson Jr. is averaging 3.8 points, 6.5 assists and 4.3 rebounds per game.
• Houston is shooting 51 percent from the field and 47 percent beyond the arc while limiting opponents to 38 percent shooting overall and 27 percent from 3-point range.
• The Cougars are outscoring its opponents by 26.5 points per game, outrebounding foes by 8.0 per contest and have a 2.3 assist:turnover ratio.
• Head coach Kelvin Sampson is in his third season directing the Cougars and has a 539-299 career record with 13 NCAA appearances and a Final Four while leading Houston, Indiana, Oklahoma, Washington State and Montana Tech.

THE SERIES
• The Big Red and the Cougars will be squaring off on the hardwood for the first time.
  • Cornell is 6-7 all-time against current members of the AAC and will be facing Houston for the first time.
• The Big Red has also played Cincinnati (1-0), Connecticut (1-1), East Carolina (1-2)., Memphis (0-1), SMU (0-2), Temple (1-0) and  Tulane (2-1).
• Cornell has never played South Florida, Tulsa or UCF.
• The Big Red hasn't played an AAC team since the conference was formed from the old Big East in 2013.
• This is the only schedule game against an AAC team this season.

A WIN OVER HOUSTON WOULD ...
• make Cornell 2-4 on the season and 2-3 on the road.
• give Cornell a 1-0 lead in the series.
• finish the Big Red's three-game road swing with a 2-1 record.
• even Cornell's all-time record against AAC teams at 7-7.
• be the 1,236th in program history (1,235-1,391 in 117 seasons, .470).

LAST TIME OUT
• An early Monmouth run put Cornell on its heels and the Hawks never relented, evening its record with a 76-61 victory over the Big Red on Nov. 22 at OceanFirst Banks Center.
• Sophomores Troy Whiteside and Stone Gettings each scored 14 points, a career-high for the former and the fifth straight double figure game to start the season for the latter.
• Gettings added eight rebounds and two assists.
• Senior Darryl Smith, who the school's single-season field goal percentage record in 2015-16, made all four shots on his way to 12 points.
• Smith added eight rebounds and three blocked shots in just 14 minutes of action.
• Senior Robert Hatter had nine points for the Big Red, who shot just 36 percent overall and 24 percent from 3-point range (8-of-34).
• Monmouth outscored the Big Red 16-4 on second chance points and controlled the backboards by a 48-37 margin.
• Justin Robinson was the lone double figure scorer for the Hawks with 19 points, while eight different scorers had at least five points.

MILESTONE WATCH
• Senior Robert Hatter is 39 points from becoming the school's 26th 1,000-point scorer.
• When he hits that milestone, he would be just the 16th player to score 1,000 points, grab 200 rebounds and dish off 150 assists.
• Senior Darryl Smith needs 18 points to reach 500 for his career and is 26 rebounds from 250.
• Sophomore Matt Morgan needs 21 3-pointers to hit 100 for his career.
• He also is six steals shy of 50.

PLAYER NOTES TO KNOW
• Sophomore Matt Morgan, a four-time Ivy League Rookie of the Week, averaged 22.6 points, 2.9 rebounds, 2.1 assists, 1.1 steals and 0.3 blocks while shooting 43/34/81 in Ivy League play last season.
• In five games so far this season, sophomore Stone Gettings has already piled up more than five times as many assists in 138 minutes of action (17) as he did last year (three) in 267 minutes.
• He also has five double figure scoring efforts after hitting that mark just once as a freshman.
• Getting's eight assists at Lafayette are the most by a non-guard since Adam Wire had eight at Albany in the 2010-11 season at Albany.
• His 12 points, eight rebounds and eight assists made Gettings just the fourth player to have at least 10 points, eight rebounds and eight assists in the same game (Zeke Marshall vs. Cortland in 1993, 12-10-8; Louis Dale vs. Toledo in 2009, 14-9-9; Chris Wroblewski vs. Yale in 2012, 18-8-10).
• In five games off the bench, freshman Josh Warren has an impressive 21 points and 25 rebounds in 86 total minutes.
• Sophomore Donovan Wright entered the game at Lafayette with 11 career points and was 0-for-2 from 3-point range before scoring 26 points on 8-of-10 from beyond the arc in the win over the Leopards.
• Wright's eight 3-point field goals is tied for third-most in a game in Cornell history and is tied for 10th in the Ivy League record books.
• Senior Darryl Smith, who set a school record for field goal percentage in a season (.649) last year, is a perfect 5-of-5 from the field this year.
• After shooting .423 from the field over his first two seasons (83-of-196), Smith is shooting .660 (103-of-156) over the last two years.
• Senior David Onuorah became the sixth player in school history to reach 100 career blocks and now has 119.
• Onuorah was one of two Ivy League student-athletes (Harvard skiier Maile Sapp was the other) chosen to represent the conference at the NCAA Student-Athlete Leadership Forum in Phoenix, Arizona this past April.
• Senior JoJo Fallas competed for Team USA at the 14th European Maccabi Games in Berlin, Germany from July 27-August 5, 2015. Fallas was one of the leaders on a team that won a silver medal, going 4-0 before dropping the gold medal game to Russia 98-87 despite his game-high 28 points. The event was the largest gathering of Jewish people in Berlin since World War II, as more than 2,000 Jewish athletes from 36 countries attended.
• Fifth-year senior center Braxston Bunce was a two-year member of Team Canada's Under-18 national team, including competing at the 2012 FIBA Americas Championship in Brazil. Canada went 4-1, with Bunce averaging 1.5 points, 2.0 rebounds and 1.5 assists in two contests.
• The Big Red returns better than 97 percent of its minutes, points, rebounds and assists from last season.
 
TEAM NOTES TO KNOW
• Brian Earl and his brother Dan (VMI) one of five active sets of brothers directing Division I programs, joining Scott (Baylor) and Bryce (Vanderbilt) Drew; Bobby (Arizona State) and Danny (Rhode Island) Hurley; Joe (Yale) and James (Boston University) Jones; and Sean (Arizona) and Archie (Dayton) Miller.
• Fourth-year assistant coach Jon Jaques was a starter and senior captain on the 2009-10 Cornell team that advanced to the NCAA Sweet 16.
• Members of the Cornell basketball team represent 10 states and one Canadian province.
• Cornell has played in 46 different states, as well as in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Australia, France and Spain. The only states the Big Red has not played in are Alaska, North Dakota, Mississippi and Wyoming - and the Big Red will cross Wyoming off the list for state 47 when it visits the Cowboys on Dec. 17 as part of the Las Vegas Invitational.
• This year's schedule features 17 games away from home and more than 12,700 miles of travel —more than halfway around the earth (circumference of 24,901 miles).
• Including the Big Red's August trip to Spain and Cornell basketball will log more than 21,000 miles of travel in just eight months.
• You could travel back and forth between New York City and Los Angeles three times and still have enough mileage left over to cycle to entire Tour de France course – twice.
• Cornell hit 233 3-pointers as a team last season, good for fourth in a single season — nine of the last 10 seasons rank in the top 10.

CORNELL SEVENTH IN IVY PRESEASON POLL
• The Cornell men's basketball team, under the direction of first-year coach Brian Earl, was picked seventh in the 2016-17 Ivy League media preseason poll.
• The media poll was made up up 17 voters - two from media covering each of the conference's eight schools and one from a national media member.
• Princeton was picked first with 12 first place votes and 130 points, while Harvard was a close second with five first place votes and 123 points.
• Defending champion Yale was slotted third (101) and Penn was picked fourth (72). Rounding out the field was Columbia (61), Dartmouth (48), the Big Red (42) and Brown (35).
• Cornell was picked to finish eighth two seasons in a row only to finish fifth and sixth, respectively.
• For a third straight season, the Big Red is expecting to upset the preseason rankings.
• Finishing fourth would give Cornell a spot in the first-ever Ivy League men's basketball tournament, and it has the weapons to challenge for a spot to compete for the automatic NCAA bid.
 
RED-WHITE GAME
• The Red team led wire-to-wire behind 20 points from sophomore Matt Morgan and 14 from classmate Donovan Wright for a 57-46 win over the White team at the annual Red-White Scrimmage on Saturday, Oct. 22 at Newman Arena.
• Morgan added three rebounds, three assists and two steals in the contest, while freshman Josh Warren had six points, six rebounds and four assists.
• Junior Wil Bathurst chipped in six points, four rebounds and three assists for the winning team, which had 13 assists to just four turnovers and made 7-of-16 3-pointers.
• Sophomore Stone Gettings (16 points, four rebounds) and senior Robert Hatter (15 points) led the White team.
• JoJo Fallas added nine points, five rebounds and two assists and senior David Onuorah had four points and a game-high nine rebounds.
• The intrasquad scrimmage was comprised of two 12-minute halves.

HOW TO FOLLOW CORNELL
• There are numerous ways to follow the Big Red through the 2016-17 basketball season.
• Men's basketball games will be broadcast on 96.3 FM The Buzzer for the 2015-16 season. Longtime voice of the Big Red Barry Leonard returns on the call with the play-by-play, while former All-Ivy center Eric Taylor '05 is on board to do color analysis.
• A half-hour pregame show and postgame analysis will enable Big Red fans to follow Coach Brian Earl's team throughout the season.
• The Big Red's home contests will all be broadcast live with streaming video as part of the IvyLeagueDigitalNetwork subscription service. Visit www.IvyLeagueDigitalNetwork.com for all the latest information on Cornell broadcasts.
• You can follow the team on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Highlights, interviews and features on all 37 of Cornell's varsity sports can be found at www.youtube.com/cornellathletics, www.facebook.com/cornellathletics or www.twitter.com/cornellsports.
 
CORNELL BASKETBALL HONORED BY NCAA ... AGAIN
• Cornell University ranks among the best according to the annual NCAA Division I Academic Progress Report (APR) for 2014-15 that was released this past May.
• The APR measures semester-by-semester records for every individual team in Division I with regard to each team members' continuing eligibility, retention and progress toward graduation.
• The NCAA "commends" teams that have APR scores in the top 10 percent within their sport, with the minimum necessary score ranging from 975 to a perfect mark of 1000 depending on the range of team scores within that sport.
• Men's basketball has been recognized eight times in the 11 years since the APR began, including six consecutive years.
 
CORNELL BEYOND THE ARC - 700 AND COUNTING
• Cornell hit eight 3-pointers at Monmouth on Nov. 22, 2016, its 777th straight game with at least one made 3-point field goal.
• With six 3-pointers against Oberlin on Jan. 11, 2014, Cornell extended its streak of games with at least one 3-pointer to 700.
• Matt Morgan hit the program's 5,000th 3-pointer when he hit a long 3-pointer at the halftime buzzer at Georgia Tech on Nov. 13, 2015.
• The last time Cornell did not hit a 3-pointer was against Denison in the 1988-89 season opener (0-for-2).
• Since the 3-point shot came into effect in NCAA play during the 1986-87 season, Cornell has hit at least one shot behind the arc in 823 of 827 games, connecting on 5,261 treys, an average of 6.4 per game.
 
CORNELL IN OVERTIME
• Dating back to the first overtime game against Penn way back in 1922, Cornell is 40-48 in games that go an extra period.
• Cornell is 6-9 in multiple overtime games, with the longest game for the Big Red being a five overtime contest against Princeton, won by the Tigers 66-61 on Feb. 24, 1979 at Barton Hall.
• Cornell is 29-18 in home overtime games, 2-2 in neutral contests and 10-27 in road games.
 
BIG RED HOOPS ENJOYS FOREIGN TRIP TO SPAIN
• Cornell University has one of the broadest reaches of any educational institution in the world, and that reach was evident when the men's basketball team made a goodwill tour of Spain in August.
• First year head coach Brian Earl and his staff had their first extended opportunity to work with the team when it took a 10-day trip overseas that included three contests.
• Starting with a five-day training camp in Ithaca prior to leaving, the team visited Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona prior to the new semester beginning.
• The Big Red enjoyed time in all three cities, visiting the Royal Palace of Madrid, attending a Barcelona soccer match, and touring the country's former capital of Toledo as well as the Valencia bullfighting museum.
• Seventeen players and eight staff members in total made the trip to Europe.
• The Big Red went 3-0 on the trip, defeating Eurocolegio Casvi 67-52 in Madrid, Valencia Select 69-63 and Sant Julia Select 72-69 in Barcelona.
• With minutes nearly evenly split among the 13 players who saw action on the trip, rising sophomore Matt Morgan led the team in scoring (14.0 ppg.), rebounding (7.0 rpg.) and steals (1.7 spg.), while senior Robert Hatter (13.3 ppg., 6.7 rpg., 3.7 apg.) also filled the stat sheet.
• Sophomores Stone Gettings (9.3 ppg., 4.3 rpg., 3.3 apg.) and Troy Whiteside (7.0 ppg., 5.3 rpg., 1.7 apg.) ranked third and fourth among the team's top scorers.
• Defensively, the Big Red allowed its three opponents to shoot just 30 percent from the floor, 25 percent from 3-point range and outrebounded opponents by 7.7 boards per game.
• Cornell has previously made foreign trips to play in places like Cuba and Australia, with the last escape coming in the spring of 2007 when the Big Red visited France.

MILLER '15 SPENDS SUMMER WITH UTAH JAZZ
• Former Cornell All-Ivy forward Shonn Miller '15 signed an NBA summer league deal to play for the Utah Jazz's entry in the Salt Lake City Summer League.
• He averaged 2.8 points and 1.8 rebounds in five games for the Jazz, including an eight-point, five-rebound performance in a win over the Portland TrailBlazers.
•Miller ranked second in the Ivy League in scoring (16.8 ppg.), rebounding (8.5 rpg.) and free-throw percentage (.834) and among the top 10 in blocks (fourth, 1.8) and steals (eighth, 1.3) en route to earning unanimous first-team all-league and second-team NABC all-district honors as a senior in 2014-15.
• He was one of 26 finalists for the Lefty Driesell Award as the nation's Defensive Player of the Year.
• he became the first Cornellian and fifth Ivy player to record 1,000 points, 600 rebounds, 100 blocks and 100 steals in a career.
• He sits in the top 20 all-time in scoring (19th, 1,065), rebounding (14th, 608), steals (11th, 126), blocked shots (fourth, 154), free throws made (13th, 266) and free-throw percentage (18th, .785).
• Following his graduation, Miller played one season at the University of Connecticut as a graduate transfer, earning American Athletic Conference honorable mention accolades.
 • Miller was taken in the first round of the NBA D-League draft (13th overall) by the Greensboro Swarm, an affiliate of the Charlotte Hornets.

NEXT UP
• Cornell will play its second home game of the season when the Big Red welcomes Northeastern to Newman Arena on Wednesday, Nov. 30 at 7 p.m.
• The Big Red trails the all-time series 4-1 in a series that dates back to the 1981-82 season.
• Northeastern won the last meeting between the teams during the 2004-05 season, an 88-85 contest at Marist's Pepsi Invitational in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
• Cornell only win over Northeastern came during the 1983-84 campaign, a 74-64 Big Red win at Barton Hall.