Cornell basketball freshman guard Matt Morgan was placed on the second team All-Ivy for the 2015-16 season. He led the league in scoring, averaging 18.9 points on 41.4 percent shooting. Morgan also added 3.1 rebounds and 2.0 assists. His 1.4 steals per game were good for third in the conference.
“He was unbelievable,” said head coach Bill Courtney. “He had a special year.”
No Cornell rookie had made an All-Ivy team since Ryan Wittman ’10 in 2007. Morgan was the first Cornell player to win Rookie of the Year since Shonn Miller ’15, who won the award in 2012.
Morgan started the season with a bang, posting 20 points in his opening game as a Cornell athlete at Georgia Tech. He connected on four-of-11 3-pointers that game. He would go on to top 20 points twice more in out-of-conference play, including a 9-for-16 performance against Binghamton in which he scored 24 points.
When junior guard Robert Hatter missed the first four games of Ivy League play, Morgan pounced on the chance to get more ball time and he made the most of it. In those first four games, he scored a total of 120 points as the Red went 2-2. In both victories, Morgan’s late-game heroics were critical.
“He wasn’t scared of the moment,” Courtney said. “He scored those points in big moments and we needed every single one of them in those four games.”
Across the rest of the in-conference season, Morgan broke the freshman scoring record and won six rookie of the week awards. One of his best performances of the year came against Harvard at home. In the first half, Morgan willed the Red to a 15-point halftime lead, scoring 22 points in that first period. Other highlights of Ivy play include a 28-point performance against Penn and 25 points in the Red’s final game of the season, a victory over Brown.
And yet despite all this, he failed to earn a place on the first team All-Ivy or win Rookie of the Year.
In a battle between two of the best rookies in Ivy League history, it was Dartmouth’s Evan Boudreaux who came out on top, earning Rookie of the Year honors. The forward was second in the league in scoring, behind only Morgan. He also was third in rebounding with 9.4 per game.
“His confidence grew like crazy [throughout the season],” Courtney said. “If you look at where he was at the beginning of the year until now, his growth as a player and his belief in himself grew leaps and bounds.”
Full award list:
Player of the Year
Justin Sears, Yale
Rookie of the Year
Evan Boudreaux, Dartmouth
Defensive Player of the Year
Agunwa Okolie, Harvard
Coach of the Year
James Jones, Yale
First Team
Maodo Lo, Columbia
Henry Caruso, Princeton
Makai Mason, Yale
Justin Sears, Yale
Brandon Sherrod, Yale
Second Team
Cedric Kuakumensah, Brown
Grant Mullins, Columbia
Matt Morgan, Cornell
Evan Boudreaux, Dartmouth
Zena Edosomwan, Harvard
Darien Nelson-Henry, Penn
Spencer Weisz, Princeton
Honorable Mention
Alex Rosenberg, Columbia
Agunwa Okolie, Harvard
Steven Cook, Princeton
Nick Victor, Yale