Mister D‘s post pointed out the well-known fact that Syracuse plays a bunch of chumps in November and December. Sure, Syracuse’s opponents are chumps — Syracuse opens up against St. Francis of New York tonight and look to whoop up on Penn or UTEP later this month. But these cupcakes are veritable giants compared to some of the other teams Big East teams are playing. Heck, at least Syracuse is playing division I opponents. Marquette opens the season against Hillsdale College. Nevermind that Hillsdale College sounds like a place high school sitcom characters go upon graduation. The real kicker is that Hillsdale is a division II team. Honestly, Marquette might as well be playing a good high school team.

It’s not just Marquette who’s beating down on the weak and downtrodden. In four days, West Virgina plays Slippery Rock, another division II team. Rutgers gets in on the division II beatdown by playing St. Thomas Aquinas on November 19th. What does it mean to be a division II team? The St. Thomas Aquinas Men’s basketball page lists as its headlines big wins over East-West University (um, how can you be both East and West at the same time?) and Concordia College of Nebraska. That was in 2005.

Other notable DII opponents include Longwood University (Beavis would like that), who go against Providence on January 2nd. That’s pushing the early-season chump rule a bit, huh, Coach Welsh? And then there’s Bellarmine vs. Louisville on Dec. 10th. Bellarmine sounds more like a furnace manufacturer than a university…

The most amusing Big East-cupcake matchup, though, is a DI team. Cincinnati plays High Point University this Sunday. Given the Bearcats off-court behavior, one has to question Coach Mick Cronin’s decision in scheduling teams. Sure, this is his first year, but shouldn’t he know his players might confuse playing High Point with getting high?

I’ll end this post with a trivia question whose answer I don’t know: why is the Ivy League the only conference who plays in-conference games on a Friday night? Looking at the schedule of Big East teams, I noticed that many of them play Friday night games early in the season, but stop once they reach Big East play. So it’s not that college basketball just doesn’t happen on Friday nights. Is it just some arbitrary rule?

Categories: Commentary, donald
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All-Access: JT3 creating own image for Hoyas 

3. Guard play will determine just how good the Hoyas are this season. Jonathan Wallace, the junior from Alabama who originally was supposed to go to Princeton to play for JT3 but came to Georgetown with no promise of a scholarship or playing time, will be the Hoyas best and most reliable guard. Wallace knows how to play, and is a steadying influence. Along with Wallace, Georgetown has sophomore Jessie Sapp and junior Tyler Crawford to take up slack in the backcourt, and freshmen Jeremiah Rivers, the son of Boston Celtics coach Doc Rivers, is a really good prospect that will play right away. Add in swing players Octavius Spann and DaJuan Summers and the Hoyas should have some real depth. Georgetown is a work in progress, but I really like the pieces that JT3 has to work with.

It’s no shock that Bilas is taking the Hoyas’ Green-led frontcourt for granted.

Categories: Dan'l B, Georgetown, PunditWatch
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The beginning of the college basketball season is both exhilarating and anticlimactic.

There are elements of the two weeks leading up to the season that you simply cannot top.

For instance, if you happen to be an undergrad, it’s tough to beat the excitement that is Midnight Madness (which a wise man once described as a pep rally with two added bonuses: 1) beer and 2) women who are finally legal). Until that point, it’s been an entire 6 months since you last saw a 40-minute basketball game during which you verbally threatened Jim Burr’s life.

Moreover, the season hits you unexpectedly. College basketball has no hot stove, no free agent acquisitions, no trade rumors. You don’t hear chatter on the national airwaves, save for a few reports on the occasional recruiting violations from [insert Big 10/12 School here] University. It’s nowhere near Sportscenter. You can just see Jay Bilas, reclining on a chaise in Acapulco from April to October, reading Kafka and sipping a frozen red beverage, his enormous brain thousands of miles from college bball. It’s a seasonal sport that hibernates during the summer and awakens hungry in the late fall. Compared to the ever-present nature of the NBA, MLB, and NFL, college basketball waxes to a climax in March and wanes into oblivion by the middle of April. And then, like a New England winter, it sneaks up on you in early November. We take a break, relax, rejuvenate, forget the heartbreak that ended last year’s season, and then all of a sudden you look at the calendar, and college basketball is one week away.

And then the season starts.

Bethune-Cookman. Niagara. Nicholls State. Montana A&M.

And for TWO STRAIGHT MONTHS we play these teams.

Sure, substitute Dartmouth for Bethune-Cookman. Switch Niagara with St. Francis Sister Mary’s College for the Undercoordinated. The point is this: if you’re a Big East team, you play cupcakes from November until January. End of story.

I grant you that sometimes you get an odd preseason tournament here, or a non-conference showdown there. But let’s be honest. 12 of the first 14 games of a season are near-guarantee victories.

Syracuse is notorious for this. Last year, not only did they play cupcakes, they made all of those teams travel to the Carrier Dome! Their first game in the dome was on November 8^th, and the team didn’t leave the state of New York until after Christmas! They went into conference play with a 12-2 mark (having lost to Florida and err…Bucknell…).

This year? They don’t leave the state of New York until January 7^th! They scheduled 11 cupcakes, and two decent out-of-conference opponents (Oklahoma St. and Wichita St.). So again, they enter Big East conference play with an 11-2 mark, at worst.

Syracuse, of course, isn’t the only one who does this. They all do it. All of the smart ones, anyway.

A few questions, though.

Could there be a bigger letdown to the start of college hoops? I don’t think so. Here we are, psyched that a new season has started, and we play Nobody College, who we’re going to whoop. And even if you wanted to view this beat-down in HD, it’s nowhere to be found on the 900 channels you have on your cable package.

Infuriating.

But can you really blame teams for setting their schedules up this way?

Think about it. The object of every program is to get into the NCAA tournament. Therefore, if you could find a way to craft a schedule that could nearly guarantee your team’s entrance to the big dance, you’d do it, right?

Teams create their cupcake-heavy schedules because it gets them into the NCAA Tourney, plain and simple. Teams in major conferences figured this out a long time ago. Consider this…imagine you’re an Athletic Director for a major Big East school, and you know the following things to be true:

1) To make it to the NCAA Tourney, your team can afford at most 11, maybe 12 losses in a season (the selection committee doesn’t like giving at-large bids to 13-loss teams, no matter what the RPI ranking may be).

2) You need to play some difficult teams to improve your strength of schedule, but you play in the Big East—so problem solved. Conference play in the Big East automatically boosts strength of schedule (which means a few good wins boosts your RPI tremendously). You have 16 of these games.

Given these two facts, here’s your formula.

1) Schedule a dozen cupcakes at the beginning of the year (12 wins), and two semi-difficult out of conference opponents (1 win, 1 loss)

2) Go at least .500 in conference play (8 wins, 8 losses), and win a game or two in the conference tournament (1 win, 1 loss).

3) And voila. Ladies and gentleman, you have just engineered a 22-10 team coming out of the Big East.

Sound like NCAA Tournament material?

You betcha. And that’s all that matters. You’re dancing.

Despite the fact that college basketball sputters at the start, I can’t argue with the logic of structuring your year in this manner. It just makes too much sense given the current system. Making it to the Dance isn’t about beating the BCS formula. It’s about showing a selection committee your “body of work,” where RPI and strength of schedule are just two of the myriad factors taken into consideration. College basketball will continue to be structured this way until the tournament selection system changes.

For now?

Bring on the Quinnipiacs and the Fairfields! Hooray for Towson, Howard, and Robert Morris! Your crappy-ass programs are footing the bill for our tickets to the big dance.

Thanks for traveling to the Carrier Dome in December…we hope you enjoy your ride home.

Oh, and be sure to watch us on CBS in March.

Categories: Commentary, Mister D
4 Comments »

As we begin a new season, some friendly faces from last year will not be with us. Some have moved on to the NBA and some have graduated, and many will be missed. Especially those players that have for one reason or another left lasting impressions on us over the past few years, such as Mike Gansey, Allen Ray, Hilton Armstrong, Quincy Douby or of course, Kevin Pittsnogle. I’ll miss them all this year, and hell, I’ll even miss Carl Krauser. I’ll miss yelling at him in the Garden while he gives his X out to his boys in the bronx. And I’ll also miss that 65 year old Pitt fan in the Zubaz pants emulating Krauser after a made free throw when he gave his X out to his homeboys from Erie, Pennsylvania.

Sure, there’s quite a few I’ll miss this year, and while we’re on the topic of Mr. Popa, I wanted to honor five players from years gone by that I still miss in this fine league.

1. Sure, sure, sure, conventional wisdom tells me that I shouldn’t pick a Georgetown player. It just doesn’t seem right. However, Victor Page was one of my favorite players to watch. The guy never met a shot that was out of range and his two years in the league went way too fast. His agent, whoever he was, was clearly an idiot. Page should have stuck around for two more years and rewritten the Georgetown scoring records.

2. Syracuse over the years has had a cast of comedic players who have entertained us all to no end. They’ve had by far the most amount of talent of all the teams in the league, and there’s an insane amount of players to choose from if I could see one again. I know who most would pick, one of the all-time greats, but for me, you could save your Ronys, Shermans, Motens, Carmelos, Gerry Macs and Wallaces. Let me see Josh Pace play one more game. This guy was fantastic, and I could never get enough of that lefty floater from the free throw line, except of course, when he was burning the Huskies with that shot.

3. I miss God Shammgod. Not just because of the name, but because his efforts were outstanding, especially how good he was at drawing fouls in the lane. Shammgod had the 97 Arizona National Champion team beaten in the Elite Eight that year, but somehow Zona got by, and Shammgod’s career was over. I miss you God.

4. I’ve never had much of a liking towards St. John’s, but let me see one more game with Marcus Hatten in the Big East. Hatten was another crazy scorer, much like Page, and I could never get enough of watching Hatten play. Like Page, he only played two years in the conference and it’s a shame he couldn’t play for more years.

5. Of course, I need to pick a UConn player, and one guy I definitely miss was John Gwynn. The microwave was one of the keys to that 1990 Elite Eight team that put UConn on the college basketball map. Gwynn was like a great pinch hitter in baseball, it was exciting just seeing him come to the table. He didn’t always make the big shot, but you knew he was going to jack it up. He wasn’t all that great, but still, he was one of the most exciting players I’ve ever watched.

Categories: Big Willie Style, Nostalgia
3 Comments »

We’re ready for it.

Categories: Commentary, Juice
2 Comments »