11.12.07

Story of the Night. Boring. There was really only one good game tonight – Syracuse 72, St. Joseph’s 69. We had this one on our upset alert radar last night, and it took a three from Jonny Flynn at the top of the key to put the Hawks away at the Carrier Dome tonight (see vid below). Amazingly, that was Flynn’s only hoop of the game, coming after his record 28 pts last night. His backcourt mate Paul Harris picked up the slack tonight, going for 18/14/6 assts/2 stls in the win. How a 6’5 guard tallies 29 rebounds in two games confounds us. Syracuse has shown that it has the guards to play with anyone, but will the Orange have anything on the interior this year? We shall see, but until then, Cuse blog Axeman Cometh tells us to get the popcorn ready.

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Things We Saw. Not much else tonight. Ohio St.-Columbia was the other ESPN game tonight, and although the Ivy League Lions gave a good effort, there was never a realistic chance for the upset. Once again, OSU didn’t really impress us, but we thought back to last year, and when did they ever impress us then either? They won 35 freakin’ games last year and we can only remember a handful where we thought ‘this is a pretty good team’ – the Big 10 championship game v. Wisconsin, the Tennessee second half comeback, and the Georgetown F4 game. So that’s how they do. We’re not going to count them out this year based on first impressions. Koufos (19/7/3 blks), Butler (18/7/3 assts) and Lighty (13/4/4 assts) led the way (Ohio St. 68, Columbia 54).

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SEC Goes on the Road. Two interesting games for SEC teams involved Vanderbilt going on the road to Toledo and Alabama going to upstart Mercer tonight. These were games that neither could afford to lose if they expect to be seriously considered for at-large bids next March. Vandy burst out to an 18-0 lead before Toledo bothered to score a single point, and although the game got close, Vandy continues to show with a balanced attack from Shan Foster and AJ Ogilvy why it will be heard from in the SEC East this year (Vanderbilt 77, Toledo 70). Bama went into a sold-out arena at Mercer and survived A-Sun Mayhem thanks to Richard Hendrix’s 28/14, but we’re patiently waiting the bottom to fall out on this team without a true point guard (Alabama 90, Mercer 83). Ole Miss also got a solid mid-major win at home over South Alabama tonight (Ole Miss 81, South Alabama 78).

Big Halftime Leads. #8 Michigan St. up 19 on Chicago St., Missouri up 30 on Fordham, #2 UCLA up 35-11 on Cal St.-San Bernardino, Washington up 21 on NJIT… (all blowout wins).

Ranked Teams.
#9 Washington St. 86, Boise St. 74. Wazzu struggled before blowing it open with a 60-pt second half.
#16 Gonzaga 80, Idaho 43. Another huge second half (44-13) led by Austin Daye (18/4/3 assts/6 blks).
#19 Texas A&M 67, Oral Roberts 53. This surprised us that it wasn’t very close.
#20 Arizona 76, N. Arizona 69. Lute is due back soon. Budinger with 25/6/4.

Upset Alert. Like we said, it was a boring night.

On Tap Tonight (all times EST). 50 more games tonight, including numerous ho-hums on FC .

• Florida (NL) v. NC Central (ESPN FC) 7pm – yes, this is the same team Duke beat by 1000 pts.
  
• UNC (-11) v. Davidson (ESPN) 7pm – Stephen Curry, neutral court??? Naaaah…..
• St. John’s (NL) v. St. Francis (NY) (ESPN FC) 7:30pm – these are the games we wish we could give back to ESPN FC.
• LSU (NL) v. McNeese St. (ESPN FC) 8pm – tune in just 5 mins to see Anthony Randolph.
• North Texas (NL) v. Oklahoma St. (ESPN FC) 8pm – see above re: St. John’s.
• Sam Houston St. (NL) v. Texas Tech (ESPN FC) 8pm – upset alert! SHSU is legit, and Knight isn’t what he used to be.
• Bradley (NL) v. Iowa St. (ESPN FC) 8pm – Bradley should win this game for the Valley.
• Texas A&M (NL) v. UTEP 9pm – Turgeon’s crew impressed tonight.
  
• California (-8) v. Southern Mississippi 10:30pm – if Ben Braun weren’t still coaching there, Cal could surprise this year.

rtmsf (3998 Posts)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 12:59 am by rtmsf and is filed under after the buzzer. Tagged: alabama, atb, atlantic sun, columbia, david lighty, jamar butler, jonny flynn, kosta koufos, mercer, ohio st, paul harris, richard hendrix, sec, st johns, syracuse, toledo, vanderbilt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.