Marty Leon is the RTC correspondent for the Patriot League.
Before we get to what is happening in our league, how about this proposal?
Name of Event: President Obama’s Ivy vs. Patriot League Challenge – The President’s Cup!!!
Where: The natural host would be American Univ., in the hometown of our hoop-loving President.
Why: To celebrate the finest student athletes in the land. Obama attended Harvard and Columbia and is the Commander in Chief of West Point (Army) and Navy. This setting could be used to promote scholarship, athletics,and service for all young people to our country. It would be a great way to showcase these conferences of the highest academic standards in the USA!!
Marty Leon is the RTC correspondent for the Patriot League.
American and Lehigh Collide in Conference Opener
The tension starts right away in the Patriot League on Saturday as defending champion and pre season favorite American University, host 10-4 Lehigh, in a battle of two of the leagues best. American has momentum, riding a three game winning streak, all games in which they dominated their opponents, and won by double digit margins. Garrison Carr has led the way for Jeff Jones’ five averaging 18.4 ppg.,second best in the conference, while Brian Gilmore covers the board getting over 6 a game. American is playing like the team we thought they would be after a slow start. This does not bode well for the rest of the conference.
Lehigh just saw a five game winning streak end with a loss to an improving Princeton team.The Mountain Hawks are off to a tremendous start at 10-4 ,a school record for non league wins. Marquis Hall and Zahir Carrington are both top ten in the Patriot in scoring and rebounding. This game will be a classic,and a sure showcase of the rest of the season as to how low scoring close games are the Patriot way.
Marty Leon is the RTC correspondent for the Patriot League.
Patriot League Struggles Out Of Conference
Navy Sole Survivor of Titanic Two Weeks. The past two weeks have been brutal on the majority of teams in the Patriot League. Army had an unthinkable loss to Presbyterian. Holy Cross lost to midwest power(?) Loyola of Chicago. Lafayette went down to Fordham, Central Connecticut and Hartford, while a young Colgate team struggling to score, lost at home to Kennesaw State. Bucknell took it on the chin against Wagner. had a twenty point loss to Stonybrook, and preseason conference favorite American bowed to Mount St. Mary’s.
For those of your who haven’t been spending as much time on Rush the Court the past few months as you should (looking at myself in the mirror), we thought we would offer you a quick guide to what we have been working on over the past few months.
General Overview: Some top quality writing/prognosticating to get you in the spirit for the run from today until the early morning hours of April 7th, 2009.
– Finally, It’s Here: New RTC feature columnist John Stevens offers his thoughts about the upcoming season.
– A Little Preseason Bracketology: RTC co-editor (Do we even have titles?) rtmsf does his best Joe Lunardi impression and makes a surprising pick for his national champion. I’m smelling an attempt to make the RTC preseason bracketology championship the new Madden cover.
– Vegas Odds – Preseason Check-In: For the degenerate gamblers out there, RTC co-founder rtmsf offers an analysis of the Las Vegas odds for the 2009 NCAA champions for pure academic purposes. . .
– Preseason Polls Released: The surprisingly employed (I’m running out of titles here) rtmsf analyzes the AP and Coaches polls going into the season with a deeper look at unanimous #1 UNC’s early schedule.
– ESPN Full Court: 562 Games of Gooey, Delicious Goodness*: Once again, rtmsf comes through with the entire ESPN Full Court schedule with a Steve Nash-style assist from Patrick Marshall of Bluejay Basketball.
Big Early Season News: While there are several big stories going into this season, there were 2 major stories that have come out recently that you should know about before you start watching games.
– Tyler Hansbrough Out Indefinitely: Who? Oh yeah, that guy. Everybody’s favorite for national POY and NBA Draft Day snub (get ready for the annual Dick Vitale rant) Psycho T will be out for a while, but we think the Tar Heels will be ok by March.
– Jai Lucas Leaving Florida: In a story that isn’t getting nearly the attention that the Psycho T story has (for good reason), Billy Donovan has lost last season’s starting point guard on the eve of the new season. While it appears that Lucas was probably heading towards a role as a backup point guard on the Gators, the timing of this announcement is surprising. It will be interesting to see what the Gators will do if freshman guard Erving Walker struggles in adjusting to SEC basketball.
As the season progresses, we will have more features and content including updates from all 31 conferences. We hope all of you are looking forward to the new season as much as we are and even if your team looks like it will struggle to make it to the NIT, remember the words of Kevin Garnett, who incidentally didn’t play a minute of college basketball (that’s another post), “Anything is possible!”
Marty Leon is the RTC correspondent for the Patriot League.
Predicted Order of Finish:
American (24-5, 14-0)
Navy (19-10, 8-6)
Lehigh (18-11, 7-7)
Colgate (17-11, 7-7)
Holy Cross (16-14, 7-7)
Lafayette (13-15, 7-7)
Army (13-15, 6-8)
Bucknell (5-23, 0-14)
What You Need to Know (WYN2K). The Patriot League is the second cousin of the Ivy, with academic standards for student-athletes tougher than 90% of the rest of the country. Bucknell and Holy Cross have been the historical kings of this league until American emerged last year. With four starters returning led by Garrison Carr, they are a lock to win the league again. Navy’sKaleo Kina and Lafayette’s Andrew Brown are two of the league’s best returnees. Here’s a clip from American’s clincher last year versus Colgate (love the RTC footage).
Predicted Champion.American(#14 NCAA) should repeat as champions. Colgate, a conference tourney finalist last year, was set to challenge until 1,000 point scorer Kyle Roemer went down for the year with an ACL tear. The experience of American and the program’s momentum after last years great season will lead them to Selection Sunday again. A possible #14 seed, Jeff Jones’ squad gave Tennessee all they could handle for 35 minutes in last year’s first round of the NCAA Tourney.
Others Considered.Navy, Lehigh, and Colgate shore up the middle of the pack. The Midshipmen return nine of their top ten scorers. Marquis Hall and Zahir Carrington of Lehigh are both potential all league performers and they could be a sleeper. Emmit Davis’ Colgate five were primed for a title run until Roemer went down, but still will be a tough out. Holy Cross is striving to return to its glory days under Ralph Willard. Jim Crews’ Army team had a nice year in 07-08 and will compete. Bucknell,with new mentor Dave Paulsen, has been crushed by preseason injuries and only has ten healthy bodies at this time.
Key Games & RPI Boosters.
American @ Oklahoma (11/14/08)
American @ Georgetown (12/6/08)
American @ Maryland (12/22/08)
Colgate @ American (2/14/09)
Neat-O Stat. Patriot League coaches have sigificant experience at multiple levels of college basketball. American’s Jeff Jones has been head coach at Virginia, Holy Cross’ Ralph Willard has been head coach at Pitt, and Army’s Jim Crews has been head coach at Evansville. On the flip side, Bucknell’s Dave Paulsen has been head coach of D3 Williams and St. Lawrence, and Emmit Davis of Colgate and a member of his staff played at St. Lawrence.
65 Team Era. The Patriot League didn’t come into existence until the 1991-92 season, but despite its pedstrian record (2-15, .118), in its short time it’s managed to make some NCAA Tournament noise over the years. Everyone of course remembers the Bucknell upsets of 2005 (Kansas) and 2006 (Arkansas), as the Bisons made it to the second round in consecutive years. But from 2001-03, Ralph Willard’s Holy Cross team seemed to live on throwing major scares into top-tier seeds, losing by only four to #2 Kentucky (2001), eleven to #1 Kansas (2002), and four to #3 Marquette (2003).
Final Thoughts. When evaluating this league, the word that comes to mind is parity. These teams are all evenly matched so rarely do you get a blowout in any conference games. This is a great coach’s league. Winning at home is crucial to having a successful season. Anyone but American emerging this season would be a huge surprise, and AmU has a chance to break through the first round and make some noise in the NCAA tournament.
WYN2K. The story of the Patriot League this season, like many other low-major leagues, is that the big dogs are suddenly vulnerable. Holy Cross and Bucknell have combined for six of the last seven Patriot League championships, but with a mass of graduations and injuries between the two, the gap between themselves and the rest of the league is closing. The question is whether the gap in talent returning has closed enough to where we can make a good faith argument that another team will win the Patriot this year. Sadly, we can’t.
Predicted Champion.Holy Cross (#14 seed NCAA). Ralph Willard’s team lost its entire starting backcourt of conference POY Keith Simmons and DPOY Torey Thomas, but guards at the low major level are easier to replace than bigs, and former 2005 ROY Pat Doherty should smoothly take over the reins of the Crusaders (if he can stay healthy). Six other players return from a 13-1 team, but the most intriguing is 6’11 center Tim Clifford. Schools at this level simply do not have the luxury of skilled size, yet Clifford (#42 block% nationally) has shown that he can anchor the post for one of the nation’s most efficient defenses (#5 in defEff and #1 in stl% nationally). The Crusaders have gone 44-1 over the last three seasons in the Patriot League against ABB (anyone but Bucknell), so there is also a psychological advantage here that shouldn’t be understated.
Others Considered. As much as we really enjoy watching Bucknell play in the NCAAs, we fear that their personnel losses are simply too much to justify picking the Bison to win the league this year. Bucknell was already losing three main cogs from its 2005/2006 NCAA squads (Chris McNaughton, Donald Brown & Abe Badmus) before it got news that incumbent forward Darren Mastropaolo tore his ACL over the summer and will likely miss this season as well (all three inside players from the nations #1 offReb% team are now gone). That leaves guard John Griffin as the team’s sole returning starter with a group of talented reserves ready to step up. While we expect Bucknell to take a bit of a step back this year, we really don’t see another team in the Patriot ready to vault into the Bison’s position as a member of the Big Two. If we have to choose one, Lehigh is probably the most viable candidate. The Mountain Hawks return several starters from a 7-7 squad, but their coach Billy Taylor jumped to Ball St. in the wake of the Ronny Thompson fiasco. One knock against this team is that, in a league filled with three-point shooters, Lehigh defends against the three like a sieve (in other words, teams shot 39.2% from three against them last year – #318 nationally). Another team we considered is Colgate, who returns most of its minutes except for leading scorer Jon Simon, but they have a tendency to underachieve (20 wins in two years) and we don’t expect that to change substantially this season.
Games to Watch. Bucknell and Holy Cross are must-watches for this league. They will probably meet three times again this season.
RPI Booster Games. This is the first league we’ve analyzed this year that pulled a complete oh-fer against BCS opponents last season (0-23). Bucknell came closest to pulling out wins, losing in OT to both Wake Forest and Penn St. (the Bison did beat Xavier 68-67). Nevertheless, this is probably a simple anomaly because this league is good enough to get a few wins against BCS teams most years. Out of only fifteen scheduled this year, here are the best opportunities.
Army @ Minnesota (11.10.07)
Bucknell @ Villanova (11.18.07)
Seton Hall @ Navy (11.23.07)
Bucknell @ Wake Forest (12.16.07)
Colgate @ Syracuse (12.18.07)
Lehigh @ Penn St. (12.31.07)
Holy Cross @ Maryland (01.08.08)
Odds of Multiple NCAA Bids. None this year, but if Bucknell and Holy Cross continue to grow their programs, there could be a foreseeable future where both of these teams would have good enough overall resumes to get an NCAA bid.
Neat-o Stat. Just how dominant have Bucknell and Holy Cross been in this league over the past three years? Try 80-4 on for size, with a perfect 28-0 record in 2007 against the other six conference members. Is it any wonder that the other six coaches are cautiously optimistic about their chances this season? Of course, in order to have a chance to win this league, the bottomfeeder group of Army, Colgate, Navy and Lafayette are going to have to do better than finishing in the bottom fifty teams nationally in offensive efficiency (cf. with Bucknell – 140th; Holy Cross – 189th).
64/65-Team Era. The Patriot actually has one of the worst conference histories of this era (2-16, .111), ranking only ahead of the SWAC (.043) and the Northeast (.042) conferences in terms of NCAA Tourney success (and tied with the OVC and Big South). Part of this is due to its seeding, which has averaged #14.9 over the years. Still, in the last five years with the ascendance of Bucknell and Holy Cross, the league has earned an average seed of #13.2, which, not coincidentally, is the period of the most success of the league. The two wins were both orchestrated by Bucknell in magnificent upsets, the 2005 victory over #3 Kansas 64-63 still resonating in the nation’s heartland (in the form offirebillself.com… joking… joking… these are simple jokes we tell…). Enjoy.
Final Thought. As we’ve gone through the low majors we’ve been a little surprised by just how many dominant programs have risen to the top of these leagues. It’s gotten to the point in several conferences where if you don’t see a particular name such as Belmont (Atlantic Sun), Penn/Princeton (Ivy), Winthrop (Big South), Davidson (Southern), or Holy Cross/Bucknell, etc., then something went seriously wrong. By pure coincidence, Holy Cross and Bucknell are the two Patriot League schools that spent the most money on its hoops programs in 2006 (h/t to Mid-Majority).
