The regular season ended with some close contests. Jay looks back at some of them, then looks ahead to the league tournament and also looks at the postseason awards.
Author: Jay Pearlman
Horizon Notebook – The Battle for the Double-Bye
Catching you up on happenings in the Horizon League, Jay looks at battles for the coveted double byes in the tournament, as well as a few middling teams hoping to host a home game. A few bottom teams have had their moments of late as well.
Northeastern Holds Off VCU in Year’s Best Game
It was as if it were a set up in advance for Virginia Commonwealth, with its returning CAA Player of the Year now a senior, leading the league in assists and 5 points ahead of the second best scorer. And as Andy Katz of ESPN has pointed out more than once, it isn’t just in the Big East (and in Big Ten football) that schedules are unbalanced, and often grossly unfair. For the moment the twelve team CAA has determined not to split into two divisions, supposedly because all the Virginia rivals want to play one another twice (yet oddly, VCU and George Mason just play once).
Horizon Notebook – Looking Towards the End Game
Everybody’s doing it. Everybody denies it, but everybody’s doing it. At this time of the year, every coaching staff in America is scrutinizing its remaining schedule. Can we win our conference? Can we get a conference tournament bye? Can we get an at-large bid to one tournament to another?
Horizon Notebook: Butler Too Good for Green Bay in Battle for First Place
The Wisconsin-Green Bay team may not have read this space recently, as we had long decided that the Horizon regular season belongs to Butler. In fact, the only question that remains in the mind of this writer is whether Butler will lose a single game, either in the Horizon regular season or in a conference tournament in which it will need to win but twice, both games at home.
Horizon Notebook – CSU Loses Wisconsin Two-Step for the Two-Seed
Coming into the weekend just past, with Butler a perfect 5-0, Wisconsin-Green Bay and Wisconsin-Milwaukee each had one loss, Cleveland State had two, and Wright State had three. And predictably, Butler stayed perfect, taking care of business this weekend in Chicago, beating Loyola and Illinois-Chicago; also predictably, Wright State took care of business in its lone game at Detroit, still stuck on three losses. So there was Cleveland State on its annual brutal trek through Wisconsin, needing two wins to be tied for second and a split to stay close; it got neither.
In ODU-VCU Matchup, Larry Sanders is Already Too Good for Gerald Lee
Larry Sanders had a big role in VCU’s win over their arch-rival, showing some of his potential.
American Sportscasters Association Snubs Basketball Announcers in Top 50
was more than a bit interested when the American Sportscasters Association came out earlier this week with its list of the 50 greatest sportscasters of all-time. Now, I recognize that the sport with the most history in this country is baseball, and the sport with the biggest television audiences in the modern era is football; also that this is a subject that reasonable folks-and lots of others-can disagree about. But I read the list, checked it twice, and somehow can’t get away from the conclusion that basketball announcers got snubbed, and badly so.
At Kent State, Ford Hopes to Make Simpson a Star
If Anthony Simpson continues to improve, Kent State’s issues at forward will be solved.
Horizon Notebook: Great Week Clarifies Horizon Race – or Does it?
By late Friday evening I was pretty sure what I was going to write in this space. With Wright State still playing without injured star Vaughn Duggins, 20th ranked Butler had no trouble dispatching the Raiders at home on Thursday night, 64-48. Remarkably (truly remarkably), Loyola-a team that I said elsewhere with some hyperbole does not have a true Division I player on its roster–removed Wisconsin-Green Bay from the ranks of conference undefeated, upsetting the Phoenix 62-60 on Monday night on Chicago’s north side.
