The Future is Wide Open
It’s looking like another wide open year in college basketball. Kansas, Kentucky, Duke and North Carolina already have two losses. Michigan State and Louisville lost at home to Carolina, who lost to Belmont at home. Meanwhile, Wichita State, San Diego State, UMass and Villanova continue to get better. Is this the year that an “unusual” team sneaks in and wins the NCAA title? I say it’s possible.
Talking about Cy-Hawk
What a great game coming this weekend when #23 Iowa visits #17 Iowa State on Friday. The Hawkeyes are a top-10 team in scoring (89.5 points per game) and assists (18 per game). Iowa has not won an NCAA Tournament game since 2001, but that ends this year. This team has the feel of a Sweet 16 squad, and coach Fran McCaffery’s squad already has wins over Xavier, UTEP and Notre Dame. Fairleigh Dickinson coach Greg Herenda said the Hawkeyes are a lot like Arizona, which might be a stretch but you get the point. Roy Devyn Marble is an exceptional player and they will need him Friday. It is the first true road test of the year for Iowa as they travel to Ames for the first ranked meeting between the instate rivals in 26 seasons. That’s hard to believe.
Orange Storm at the Garden
Really excited to see Syracuse and St. John’s renew their rivalry in Madison Square Garden on Saturday. Sometimes there’s bitterness when there are conference changes, but I am very glad cooler heads prevailed as this is a game that needs to happen every season, especially for the New York City fan base. No shock Syracuse is 9-0 and no shock Jim Boeheim continues to shine. Steve Lavin has a nice team that is very athletic and has one of the nation’s best shot blockers in Chris Obekpa, who is averaging 5.5 blocks per game this year and has 177 in his two-year career.
AAC = Above Average Conference
The American Athletic Conference may look like a jumble of teams thrown together with little rhyme or reason, but make no mistake, this is a talented league that has two of the biggest coaching names in the game with Pitino at Louisville and Larry Brown at SMU. A third big-name coach, Eddie Jordan, starts his first season at Rutgers. The AAC has talented backcourts – seven of the eleven players named to the two Preseason teams are listed as guards. While the cream of the crop may be the guards from Louisville and Connecticut, there is big time talent roaming the paint for the Houston Cougars. TaShawn Thomas is a 6′ 8″ junior averaging just a tick under a double-double with 16.4 points and 9.6 rebounds per game. If Thomas can improve on last year’s 64% shooting from the free-throw stripe, he will lead an already dangerous Houston team into the upper tier of the AAC.
– Bill Frieder
Former Michigan and Arizona State head coach Bill Frieder is an analyst for WestwoodOne’s coverage of NCAA Basketball. In his weekly blog Boxed Out, Bill scours the box scores to bring you interesting stories from the world of college basketball.
