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WH

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  1. Remember, Majerus has never had a losing season. I feel certain he won't have a losing season with this roster, either. Just give him a month or so and we'll see.
  2. Tim Ream had a fantastic year for the Red Bulls and he would have been my choice for ROY. Not the fastest center back, but great poise and positioning, never mind distribution from the back. USMNT has some good young players to choose from for the 2014 and 2018 WCs. Hard to believe he lasted as long as he did in the MLS draft. Nobody in the league, including the Red Bulls, thought he would be this good. As for the rest of the callup, Bradley didnt want to ask most of the busier guys playing in Europe. The SA game takes place outside the WC qualifying window and it's a long flight for such a meaningless game. Bradley wants to give some young guys a look and offer a reward to older MLS players whose season just ended and who would normally never get a cap.
  3. I read the board every week. Love to see all the excitement here. First time, really, since SLU joined the A-10. Wish I could be as excited about my program, UMass, which used be considered, er, A-10 Royalty! (see how easy that rolls off my tongue, er, keyboard). Looking forward to the X and Temple games. The Bills are either going to shock the league, or fall back a bit as expected because of youth. My guess is that X is too big, too athletic, playing real well right now. Temple is much like SLU. Dunphy runs a lot of screens and picks and is probably the most similar coach in the league to RM. But the Bills match up pretty well. SLU is definitely the team I would least like to play in the A-10 tourney.
  4. I think this is the first time I have ever seen the phrase, A-10 Royalty. Wonder what Burwell is drinking! I suppose X can be considered royalty, and Temple is back on top again, but Richmond, Dayton and Charlotte? Uh-UH. In any case, SLU has not cost any A-10 a bid. Charlotte beat the Bills, of course, and Dayton can look at losses to St. Joe's and Duquesne. URI just isn't beating enough of the league's best teams. A loss by Temple or Xavier to SLU won't hurt their prospects at all. I also doubt anyone in the A-10 is getting nervous about SLU being good. Really, now. The league will be even better if the Bills are good and RM is back in the national spotlight. All I can say is: more please. I think most A-10 fans think the same.
  5. Nothing wrong with vehemently well argued points, Taj! Besides, doing previews for a decade now has made me humble about the whole prediction business. I emphatically reject any claim of any expertise. What makes predictions harder this year is the seeming parity. I don’t see a whole lot separating teams. Not sure that’s a good thing, either. It could cost us some at-large bids. Like you, I believe religiously that college basketball is more of a guard’s game. Great forwards or true centers are hard to find. Because of their scarcity, however, good bigmen can have an outsized impact on their team’s performance. Lasme was a good example. He didn’t play well against the Bills, but he had a great senior year and was dangerous on offense and defense. Dangerous enough to get picked in the NBA second round. I think Chris Wright can have that kind of impact on Dayton. I think he’s that good. I also think Dayton’s guards are talented enough to play a complementary role. (Warren has been wildly inconsistent, but he’s better than Polk.) Put it this way: If I were given a choice of getting Roberts back for one year in exchange for dropping Wright, I would decline. Wright has the ability to take this team farther than Roberts ever could have. The Flyers have a veteran team and the players rebound and defend. Scoring might be an issue early on, but a team can go far with Dayton’s particular strengths, especially when there’s a stud on the roster. Larry Hughes did the same for the Bills once upon a time. Re: A-10 tourney. I haven’t gone since my kids were born. I was hoping to go last year but my wife was traveling. AC is less than three hours from my house and I would like to go next March. I am planning on it.
  6. There will always be surprises - it's part of what makes sports so great. And there will be some more in the A-10 this year, to be sure. One reason is because the league is so deep. I didnt actually say the overall level of talent in the A-10 is much higher this year than last year, Taj. It may not be. I don't see any potentially great teams like last year's X squad, for instance. What I meant is that the caliber of talent has risen leaguewide, especially at the bottom. The result is that the raw level of talent appears to be closer from 1-14 than anytime I can remember. Usually the A-10 has had 2-3 dogs every season. Not this year. The Bonnies have sharply upgraded their talent and Duquesne and Fordham both signed large and talented recruiting classes. The Duquesne class might even rival the Bills class. That's not to say those teams won't lose lots of games in conference play. Someone has to. What I do hope is that the higher talent base leads to a strong noncon record and hence at-large bids. As for Dayton, I would point out that UMass got BETTER after losing two A-10 First Team players, Rashaun Freeman and Stephane Lasme (also the conference POY two years ago). I think it's much easier to replace one guy than two or five. Roberts will be missed, but in some ways the team's over reliance on him held his teammates back. I fully expect other Flyers to step up, just as many STL fans expect their frosh to step up. We'll see.
  7. You make many excellent points, CT, and I even made some of them myself. (-: I do allow for most teams to over or underperform, but in the case of STL, I see 11th as a worst-case scenario. I cannot imagine a healthy team with Lisch, Liddell, Majerus and a new arena finishing below Fordham, Duquesne or Bonaventure. Can the Bills win more A-10 games than last year (7-9)? I am uncertain. Granted, the team is more talented, but younger players do make more mistakes and their defense is usually inconsistent. Despite the mediocre talent on last year's team, the seniors did play like seniors. In other words, they played good D most of the time and didn't make as many mistakes. That goes a long way in explaining the 7 conference wins. Whatever the case, it should be a exciting year for the Bills despite the youth. Recruiting is no longer a dead zone and the freshmen class is worthy of the buzz it's generated. Sure beats thinking about Ikeator, Dixon, Maguire, Knollmeyer, Relphorde, Mitchell, etc.
  8. I've always said my predicted order of finish is the LEAST valuable part of my previews. I simply do it because fans love to argue about it. Whenever I raise the idea of dropping order of finish, everyone on the A-10 board objects. In any case, “worse” is a highly relative and subjective term, Clock Tower. I think the Bills could finish anywhere from 5th place to 12th place, assuming every A-10 team maintains good health. I think six or seven teams are clearly better than STL. I would lump the Bills in the second group of about five teams. I err toward a cautious forecast for a simple reason. I have seen all of the returning players around the league – some quite a bit - but I have seen none of new Bills, save for some web clips. What’s more, the current A-10 might have the most depth, top to bottom, I have ever seen. The talent level has especially improved among the lesser programs. Easy wins will be harder to come by. As a result, one extra win, or loss, could be worth several spots in the standings. My gut told me to rate STL higher, partly because I expect RickMa to outcoach some of his counterparts. Ultimately I went by my “book,” so to speak, valuing experience over youth. My book isn’t always right, but it’s tended to guide me well in the past when writing my previews. On new players: By and large I rely on second-hand info of people who've seen them play, although I do peruse the video clips on the Web and see a few kids first-hand. In Reed's case, the chief analyst of PrepStars handbook saw him play a number of times and came away impressed with his offensive skills in summer camps. The big knock, as that analyst saw it, was Reed's physical immaturity, which contributed to difficulties on defense.
  9. This is the hardest team in the A-10 to assess and I frankly lack conviction in putting the Bills 11th. My placement is based on record in conference play. After I looked at the team’s A-10 sked, I had STL anywhere from 5-11 to 8-8 before ending up at 6-10 (same record as the team I place 10th). Like Davidnark, though, I would not be surprised if the Bills finished higher. If I were a betting man, I would take the over (higher-place finish) for the reasons he cites. In fact, I made the very same points in the thread on the Bills at the A-10 board. I would disagree, however, with the notion that I am underplaying the impact freshmen can have in today’s game. Certainly I remember the boost Lisch and Liddell gave to the Bills as frosh. I just think most A-10 teams have plenty of talent in their upper classes returning. Generally speaking, if older players have raw talent roughly equal to that of younger players, experience wins out. The X-factors, of course, are Majerus and the new arena. Majerus should be energized now that he has his own players to work with. If he still is a great coach – and I think he is – he’ll find a way to get the Bills to 8-8 or even 9-7 in conference play. The Chaif should also help in that regard. Anything better than that would be an astonishing achievement, but after seeing what another great coach, Fran Dunphy, did in his second year at an A-10 program, I am unwilling to bet against RM.
  10. I dunno. When I looked at this impressive 7-player recruiting class compiled by Majerus, I wonder what the problem is. Sure looks like St. Louis is recruiting just fine to me. The Bills might be missing out on some good kids, but they've gotten others. Would these kids have come if St. Louis were in the MVC? Impossible to say, but I find it hard to believe that some recruits turned down Majerus because they wanted to play Creighton and SIU instead of Xavier and UMass.
  11. Far be it from me to convert the unconverted when it comes to Calipari. B-Roy and I have discussed this before. As a Umass fan who witnessed the exalted work of Saint Cal, I am obviously a partisan supporter. Always will be. However, one point I do want to make is this: Calipari did not recruit the "best" players when he was at UMass. We had some really good players, to be sure, but most were not top 100 recruits. The Final 4 team had two kids who were top 100 recruits in high school, the most notable being Marcus Camby of course. The rest were mostly overlooked players who were often undersized for their positions. Nothing like this bounty of supremely athletic, supremely gifted squad that Calipari has now. I don't know what St. Louis and Charlotte fans saw of Cal at Memphis that's led to this view of him that he can't coach all that great. All I know is this: I watched Cal orchestrate the best rebuilding job in college basketball history when he was at UMass during the late 1980s and 1990s. I watched or listened to almost every game for eight years. If you had seen what I had seen, game in and game out, you would not be having a discussion about whether Cal can coach.
  12. http://www.boston.com/sports/colleges/mens...ht_for_majerus/
  13. I'm certainly not trying to fan any flames. The thought that Soderberg would cheat would never occur to me, but I and others found the following sentence in the school statement rather curious: "The new head coach also must be committed to the University's history of following NCAA regulations and graduating its student-athletes." Of course, the school also talks about Soderberg's integrity in its statement, but why mention anything about following NCAA rules? It's to be expected that any new coach hired will follow the rules. I suspect someone got a little excited when writing the statement, but who knows. It would have been better to leave that sentence out.
  14. Although I won't change my predictions, I could see Joe's moving above GW, which has some big problems with depth and experience. Nor would it surprise me if they surpassed Dayton or Fordham. I just couldnt get past the young guards. I dont think they will quite measure up this year to what L&L did last year for the Bills. Next year, though? The Hawks are likely to be one of preseason favorites to win the league.
  15. That largely has to do with his recruiting, 3 star, as I mentioned. If he were a great recruiter, well, he wouldnt be at St. Louis anymore! There are only two coaches in the A-10 that are clearly superior to Soderberg in terms of strategy, X and Os, etc. As for where I place the Bills, it matters not of course. You folks know how good your team can be. That said, I toyed with placing St. Louis from 1 to 4. Like just above every college team, the Bills have some questions that need answering. On Lavender: I hold a higher opinion than B-Roy. He did well in Oklahoma and the Sooners actually missed him last year. Hard for me to blame a player who has a falling out with Sampson. There's been more than a few. Basically, Lavender will be fine if he doesnt try to do it all. Xavier has plenty of players who can score. DL will be a major, major upgrade on Finn.
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