Explaining our absence...and see you in the CIT?

Just wanted to inform the Loyal Readers (all eight of you!) that this will probably be the last post for at least a few days due to a death in the family. We’ll be back to some semblance of regular posting as soon as we can and humbly request you check in on us when you get a chance.

As for the Flying Dutchmen’s postseason hopes, my guess is they won’t profit from the uncanny success of the Chalke in the mid-majors (only five regular season champs have fallen in their postseason tourneys, with Stephen F. Austin still to play in the Southland finale today; eight regular season champs lost their tourneys and earned automatic bids to the NIT each of the last two years) and earn a bid to the NIT, though you can never rule out the tournament wanting a New York presence.

The tea leaves indicate the Dutchmen won’t host a game in the CBI or CIT, since there’s been no announcement of ticket sales by the school. Hard to blame them for not wanting to fork over $60,000 for a home game in the CBI or $28,000 for a home game in the CIT, especially with the economy in the crapper and most average fans having no idea these tourneys exist. But I think the Dutchmen are deserving of hosting a CIT game, perhaps against Rider, and that they’d have a decent shot at drawing the 2,500 or so fans necessary to make back the fee.

My prediction: The Dutchmen make the CIT and visit Seton Hall. Unbelievably (and I say that with admiration), someone has come up with a site projecting the CIT field. I wish I’d thought of that. That site has the Dutchmen headed for a three seed in the 16-team tournament and a potential game against either high-scoring VMI or regular NIT foe Saint Joseph’s.

Regardless, hopefully we’ll have another game (or two, or three, or four) this season to recap at some point.

Oh, and if Mason makes the NCAA, it’ll confirm every conspiracy theory I’ve ever had about anything and assure that my return post will be X-rated. See you soon.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com. And join the Defiantly Dutch group at Facebook today!

Chalke Talk: Thursday

Top seeds winning makes Sarah Chalke--and us--happy.

Another day, another boost for the Flying Dutchmen’s postseason hopes. The Chalke was 3-for-3 as Robert Morris eked out a 48-46 win over Mount St. Mary’s in the Northeast Conference title game and top seeds Morgan State (MEAC) and Alabama State (SWAC) easily won quarterfinal games. The Robert Morris victory was the third time since Sunday a regular season champ has won its championship game in the waning seconds and at least the fifth nail-biting win overall for a no. 1 seed.

There are no conference title games tonight (the calm before the flurry of title games Friday and Saturday), but top seeds in the MAC (Bowling Green—my bad for mistakenly writing Bowling Green was in action Wednesday), Southland (Stephen F. Austin) and WAC (Utah State) play quarterfinal games.

Here’s the updated tally of regular season champs. As usual, those in italics have won their conference tourney and the NCAA automatic bid while those in bold lost in their conference tourney and are bound for the NIT. I’ll update this every day through Sunday.

CAA: VCU
A-East: Binghamton
Atlantic Sun: Jacksonville
Big Sky: Weber State
Big South: Radford
Big West: CSU-Northridge
MAAC: Siena
Mid-American: Bowling Green
MEAC: Morgan State
Missouri Valley: Northern Iowa
Northeast: Robert Morris
Ohio Valley: Tennessee-Martin
Patriot: American
Southern: Davidson
Southland: Stephen F. Austin
Summit: North Dakota State
SWAC: Alabama State
Sun Belt: Western Kentucky
WAC: Utah State

Perhaps even more importantly, the Dutchmen’s status as the metropolitan area team most deserving of a postseason bid was solidified Wednesday at Madison Square Garden, where St. John’s fell to Marquette in embarrassing fashion and Seton Hall lost to Syracuse in a pair of Big East quarterfinals.

A halfway-decent performance by the Red Storm in the Big East Tournament might have earned them a look as a host team in the CBI or CIT, but 10 points in one half? Geez. Even the Dutchmen scored more than that during their can’t-shoot-straight phase.

Seton Hall is at least over .500 at 17-15, which makes it a more legitimate postseason candidate, and the Pirates were the only metro area team ranked ahead of the Dutchmen in the NCAA RPI released Monday (the Pirates were 100th while the Dutchmen were 106th).

But the Pirates finished 11th in the Big East with a 7-11 league mark and Cincinnati, Notre Dame and Georgetown are all ahead of Seton Hall in the RPI and, presumably, in the race for NIT spots. Will the NIT want to follow in the footsteps of the NCAA and award one-eighth of its bids to Big East schools? And does an 11th-place finisher—even in the big bad Big East—deserve a spot in the NIT over the Dutchmen, who won 21 games and finished fifth in the CAA with an 11-7 mark?

You know my answer to that last one. That said, my guess is it’s a moot point and neither team is going to the NIT.

But a Hofstra-Hall (not at Hofstra Hall, unfortunately) game might appeal to the CBI. The Pirates drew an average of 5,782 fans to seven non-conference games, which is less than half the capacity of that new arena in Newark (hey, if the sponsor wants me to mention its name, it can cut me a check). But the exorbitant ticket prices at said arena—a quick Internet search didn’t reveal the ticket prices for 2008-09, but according to the Seton Hall website, season ticket holders got a great bargain at an average price of $28 per ticket—all but guarantee that the Hall would make back the $60,000 hosting fee.

Let’s say tickets for a CBI game are $28 apiece. To draw 5,782 would bring in $161,896. To draw even half that would still net the school a profit.

It’s worth noting Seton Hall turned down a bid to the CBI last year, when it also finished 17-15. But that was when Bobby Gonzalez was butting heads with his bosses. He’s doing a better impersonation of a sane human being this time around.

A Hofstra-Hall game would not only determine the best team in the metro area this year but also its best player: Charles Jenkins and Jeremy Hazell (check out his stats here) are the two leading candidates for the Haggerty Award. And it would pit the school that wanted Tom Pecora against the school that kept him. Hmmm. Juicy, yes? OK maybe not, but it might be the best we can do, damnit.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com. And join the Defiantly Dutch group at Facebook today!

Chalke Report: Wednesday

Good thing there's only four days left before the NIT field is revealed, because there's a whole lotta Sarah Chalke pictures out there, a whole lotta which will get you (or me) in trouble at work (or at home).

Things went about as well as could have been expected for the Flying Dutchmen’s NIT hopes last night. The Chalke (yes, that’s my new March Madness spelling of it) went 2-1, with Weber State getting upset at home by Montana State in the Big Sky semifinals.

That makes four mid-major regular season champs headed for the NIT, but it could have been five or six because 1-2 easily could have been 0-3. North Dakota State came back from a 14-point deficit to beat Oakland in the final seconds of the Summit League championship game while Western Kentucky got off to a fast start against South Alabama and survived a mid-game funk to hang on in the Sun Belt title tilt.

NIT bubble teams may have been helped by Cleveland State’s upset of Butler in the Horizon League championship game. You want to feel the hair on your arms stand at attention, by the way, check out the highlights of that game, with Cleveland State coaches and players alike shedding tears of joy.

Of course, the net effect of Cleveland State’s win is probably zero when you consider that a team that would have missed the NIT had Cleveland State made it will probably still miss it, since a Saint Mary’s or a San Diego State is going to fall into the NIT from the NCAA. And the NITology site still has the Dutchmen well down on the bubble.

Ahh, the hell with it, my blog, my positive spin. Cleveland State’s win helped the Dutchmen! Hooray Cleveland State!

There are four Chalke games tonight, including the Northeast Conference championship between top-seeded Robert Morris and second-seeded Mount St. Mary’s. Top seeds Bowling Green (Mid-American Conference) and Morgan State (MEAC) and Alabama State (SWAC) are in quarterfinal contests.

Here’s the updated tally of regular season champs. As usual, those in italics have won their conference tourney and the NCAA automatic bid while those in bold lost in their conference tourney and are bound for the NIT. I’ll update this every day through Sunday.

CAA: VCU
A-East: Binghamton
Atlantic Sun: Jacksonville
Big Sky: Weber State
Big South: Radford
Big West: CSU-Northridge
MAAC: Siena
Mid-American: Bowling Green
MEAC: Morgan State
Missouri Valley: Northern Iowa
Northeast: Robert Morris
Ohio Valley: Tennessee-Martin
Patriot: American
Southern: Davidson
Southland: Stephen F. Austin
Summit: North Dakota State
SWAC: Alabama State
Sun Belt: Western Kentucky
WAC: Utah State

Hofstra isn’t the only CAA school observing conference tournaments with interest. Old Dominion is so confident it will host a game in one of the three non-NCAA Tournaments that it will begin selling tickets Friday, while James Madison is continuing to practice in hopes its long-shot bid for the CBI or CIT comes through. Hey, if the Dukes are willing to pony up, the CBI will probably throw ‘em a home game.

A few left over bits and bytes from the CAA Tournament:

—Whether you were hitting “refresh” all weekend or not (and if it’s the latter, shame on you), take another trip down memory lane with Litos’ tournament blog. It went well enough that he’s already thinking about next year. But I refuse to be satisfied until he unveils “BruiserCam.” That NEEDS to happen.

—It didn’t work out the way we would have liked, but the Dutchmen-Old Dominion quarterfinal lived up to the hype (Let’s hear it for me and Litos! We are so smart! We are so smart! S-M-R-T I mean S-M-A-R-T!) as the best game of the tournament. And there was little competition for that honor: Only one other game (Towson’s 58-54 win over Northeastern in the quarters) was settled by less than eight points. Not quite the nail-biting weekend we envisioned after an unpredictable regular season, but that’s why they play the games.

—Old Dominion is Hofstra’s new Towson—the opponent that has a knack for handing the Dutchmen heart-breaking losses. The Monarchs have beaten the Dutchmen in the postseason four times since 2005 and has trailed at the half the last three times. Do not lead ODU at the half in the postseason. Nothing good can ever happen.

Does this mean ODU will be a perennial also-ran in whichever conference the Dutchmen are in come 2024? I’d like to say I hope so, but I can’t muster up any contempt for the Monarchs. They’re just a really good, solid, well-coached team.

—Speaking of contempt, I was too busy reveling in George Mason’s thumping yesterday to marvel at just how impressive VCU was in the championship game—not just winning like it did, but winning like it did in the only game of the year that mattered. Navigating the land mine of the CAA and winning a record third straight regular season—all in a season surrounded by a last-time-around vibe—was an impressive accomplishment, but the Rams had to win on the second Monday of March to validate their entire season.

Fair? Of course not. But that’s how it works in a mid-major, especially one with a graduating stud of a senior and a hot young coach likely destined for a BCS school by this time next month. That’s huge pressure, and to play a nearly perfect game like the Rams did with 365 days of buildup is remarkable.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com. And join the Defiantly Dutch group at Facebook today!

You can’t spell Mason Nation without N-I-T

This is the theme to Larry’s show, the opening theme to Larry’s show, this is the music George Mason won’t hear at all this month...

The wife and I ordered some takeout food in advance of last night’s CAA final. It was quite a fine meal: Pizza, a small dish of baked ziti, some garlic knots. Yet the best part was free and wasn’t even delivered by the restaurant: A heaping, filling, diet-busting dose of Schadenfreude. Mmmmmm.

Yeah, I know: The Flying Dutchmen’s CAA season ended two games earlier than George Mason’s and yeah, I know, you probably won’t be able to spell Flying Dutchmen without C-I-T. And yeah, I know, when a mostly grown man cackles with glee over a team losing a sporting event, he reveals himself to be shallow and immature.

I don’t care. VCU’s wire-to-wire 71-50 thrashing of Mason—the most lopsided CAA title game ever, by the way—was so very tasty, I must rely on a fictitious character to properly summarize my feelings (starts around the 14-second mark, but if you stick around for the whole thing, you can see the easy-on-the-eyes Sarah Chalke as well as a pivotal moment in Scrubs history).



It was just about a perfect game for VCU, right down to Anthony Grant pulling Eric Maynor and Larry Sanders with 1:49 left. Brilliant move. You never know what could happen in the waning seconds of a game in which Mason is getting smoked, after all.

This is two straight duds for Mason on the national stage. First the 18-point loss to Notre Dame in the NCAA Tournament and now this. Might be time for a new bag of tricks for Jim Larranaga. Tom Pecora has never lost a postseason game by 21 points, and the only one he lost by 18 points or more was at the end of a season in which Hofstra went 8-21. Just saying.

Anyway, never would have guessed Sanders (with a man-among-boys line of 18 points, 20 rebounds and seven blocks) would outshine Maynor. Can someone get in his ear and tell him to follow Maynor to the NBA…or at least Grant to whatever BCS school he ends up coaching next year?

Nice job, Rams, and it’ll be nice to have a team to root for next Thursday or Friday (and hopefully beyond). And now Tom O’Connor has five days to come up with a way for the Selection Committee to award Mason an at-large bid while he’s “not in the room.”

Mason’s loss wasn’t the only good thing to happen to Dutch Nation (snort) last night. The Dutchmen’s slim hopes of earning an NIT bid were boosted when Siena won the MAAC. Tonight, root for the chalk to come out on top tonight in the championship games of the Summit (North Dakota State) and Sun Belt (Western Kentucky) as well as for the top seed to escape a semifinal game in the Big Sky (Weber State).

And maybe you should root for Cleveland State against Butler in the Horizon final. Butler, a top 20 team, should be headed for the NCAA regardless of how it fares, but Cleveland State moving up to the NCAA opens up an NIT spot…that will probably be filled by a Big Six school anyway.

Below is the entire list of the regular season mid-major conference champions. I didn’t include the Horizon, West Coast, Conference USA or Atlantic-10 because the regular season champions of those leagues are almost surely going dancing even if they lose in their conference tourneys (and Gonzaga won the WCC last night anyway).

Those in italics have won their conference tourney and the NCAA automatic bid while those in bold lost in their conference tourney and are bound for the NIT. I’ll update this every day through Sunday.

CAA: VCU
A-East: Binghamton
Atlantic Sun: Jacksonville
Big Sky: Weber State
Big South: Radford
Big West: CSU-Northridge
MAAC: Siena
Mid-American: Bowling Green
MEAC: Morgan State
Missouri Valley: Northern Iowa
Northeast: Robert Morris
Ohio Valley: Tennessee-Martin
Patriot: American
Southern: Davidson
Southland: Stephen F. Austin
Summit: North Dakota State
SWAC: Alabama State
Sun Belt: Western Kentucky
WAC: Utah State

Expect another handful of regular season champs to fall in their tourneys and into the NIT. Eight spots in the NIT have gone to mid-major regular season champs in each of the last two years.

All this being said, I think the NIT is a real long shot. The RPI (106, according to Jerry Palm as of Monday morning—down seven spots from last week) just isn’t high enough and there’s too many 20-win teams outside the Big Six conferences (26, as of this morning) and too many BS schools (hey, I like that) with less than 20 wins all fighting for too few spots.

The Dutchmen have the strongest NIT case of any area school (barring a run by Seton Hall in the Big East tournament), so I’m tempted to harbor some hope that the NIT will still want New York representation, despite its proclamations that the NCAA-run tournament will not allow regional bias to slip into the selection process (yeah, because the NCAA Tournament is such a paragon of freaking virtue). But how much media buzz can a team create when it’s not even covered on the road by its hometown newspaper? Nor are the Dutchmen likely to run off three straight wins on the road to get to Madison Square Garden for the Final Four.

In addition, the guy behind the awesome site NITology.com only has the Dutchmen listed among 32 bubble teams, which, you know, is not real encouraging given his pretty impressive track record picking the NIT. The good news is the Dutchmen were one of his three misses in ’07, so keep your fingers crossed…and keep rooting for the chalk. Or the Chalke, if you prefer.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com. And join the Defiantly Dutch group at Facebook today!

The Day After

The author, above, wonders what the bowling ball is doing strewn about the beer and booze bottles.

That little red-haired orphan was right. The sun did come up tomorrow. Or, in this case, yesterday.

Except said sun came up an hour later than it did on Saturday. That’s right: The Flying Dutchmen’s loss to Old Dominion in the CAA quarterfinals was so jarring, it completely screwed with the time/space continuum.

Or maybe the sun rose on time, and I just didn’t notice because I wasn’t yet functioning following a Saturday night of drowning my sorrows at Fezziwigs, belting out “American Pie” and “Brown-Eyed Girl” with Rick and Ted and generally living out the lyrics of a Poison song.

Anyway, Sunday wasn’t nearly as soul-crushing as Saturday, but it was disappointing nonetheless. I’m from the school of thought that says if the team you root for can’t win the championship, root for the team that eliminated your team to win it all. Well, with occasional exceptions, of course.

But Old Dominion couldn’t recover from a run by VCU early in the second half and fell to the top-seeded Rams, 61-53. Like the Dutchmen a day earlier, the Monarchs squandered an early double-digit lead, fell behind late in the first half before coming back to take a one-point halftime lead. Unlike the Dutchmen, there was no second half comeback for ODU, which trailed the final 17 minutes. I’d like to say the Dutchmen wore out the Monarchs Saturday, but I think the real problem Sunday was Gerald Lee’s re-injured ankle and Eric Maynor’s general awesomeness.

In the nightcap, Towson’s shocking run came to a halt when the Tigers ran out of gas in the second half against George Mason, which means a season of wild unpredictability ends with 1 vs. 2 in the championship game for only the second time since the CAA expanded in 2001-02. I think that’s ironic, in that it’s not ironic at all.

It would have been easy to root for Towson had it gotten to tonight, but instead we’ll have to be willing to sacrifice an NIT bid for the greater good. Sure, a Mason win would almost surely help the Dutchmen’s NIT candidacy (more on that tomorrow), but I’d rather clean all the bathrooms in Grand Central Station with my tongue (and have a 2008 CIT banner hanging at the Arena) than spend a single second in Mason Nation. Anyone got a VCU jersey I can borrow for a couple hours?

Make sure to check out Litos' excellent blog for much more about the semifinals and make sure to click repeatedly throughout the title game tonight.

Other bits and bytes from The Day After:

—I never linked to the stories about Hofstra-ODU. I’d like to say I was in denial, but the truth is I just forgot. So check out the Dutchmen-centric stories from the Daily News and Newsday as well as the excellent coverage from the Virginia newspapers. The Richmond Times-Dispatch has a gamer, as does the Newport News Daily Press (check out the bummer of a picture from the immediate aftermath of Charles Jenkins’ miss at the buzzer). This Daily Press blog breaks down the Jenkins-Lee battle while this column profiles Jonathan Adams, the Monarchs’ lone senior, their emotional leader and the big ol’ meanie who blocked Jenkins’ shot. And The Virginian-Pilot profiles the soft-spoken Lee.

—The Dutchmen’s NIT hopes got more good news than bad news in the aftermath of the loss to ODU. Davidson, the top seed in the Southern Conference and the darlings of the 2008 NCAA tournament, lost to College of Charleston in the semifinals and are likely bound for the NIT (much to the relief of the Big Six, I am sure). But top-seeded Northern Iowa won the Missouri Valley while top seeds Binghamton (America East) and American (Patriot) survived scares. Tonight, the Dutchmen need to root for a win by Siena in the MAAC finals.

The d’oh/whoo-hoo moment of the weekend, meanwhile, occurred in the Atlantic Sun championship game Saturday, when East Tennessee State beat Jacksonville. That’s good because it means the Dutchmen have beaten an NCAA Tournament team: The Dutchmen edged ETSU 76-75 in the third game of the Charleston Classic way back in November. But it’s bad because Jacksonville was the A-Sun’s regular season champ, which means it’s headed for the NIT.

The Dutchmen last beat an NCAA-bound team in 2006-07, when they eked out a 65-64 win over eventual Patriot League champion Holy Cross in the Bracket Buster.

—And speaking of the America East, I always follow its conference tournament, and Binghamton’s comeback win over New Hampshire restored a shred of sanity to a tournament that went haywire for the first time ever. Had fourth-seeded New Hampshire—coached by Bill Herrion, who led Drexel to three straight NAC/A-East titles from 1994-96—held on to a five-point lead in the final two minutes, it would have hosted the title game against sixth-seeded Maryland-Baltimore County.

That would have been crazy stuff for a conference in which only one team seeded lower than second has won the title and in which at least one top two seed has reached the title game every year since 1983. Along those lines, the VCU-Mason matchup tonight assures that a top two seed will win Hofstra’s conference tournament for the 14th time in 15 years. Damn you chalk! Damn you to hell!

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com. And join the Defiantly Dutch group at Facebook today!

Bits and Bytes: Saturday

Can’t say this enough: If you’re not clicking repeatedly on Litos’ tournament blog, you’re missing out on some great stuff. The above clip contains footage shot before, during and after the Flying Dutchmen’s win over UNC-Wilmington. It’s almost as good as being there and he’s really revved up for today, so check back all afternoon and evening.

Give the Dutchmen’s win another look by reading the game stories from the Richmond Times-Dispatch (as well as a notebook that features items on both the Dutchmen and Old Dominion), the Daily News and Newsday. Tom Pecora also appeared after the game with Mike Francesa, who, to the surprise of no one, could not be bothered to figure out what Charles Jenkins did before Pecora called in.

Pecora hints he believes the Dutchmen need to win today to give themselves a decent chance of earning an NIT bid, should, of course, they not win the tournament and the automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament. I still think today’s game is an elimination game for the NIT—no way a 32-team tournament takes a fourth- or fifth-place team from the CAA that didn’t get out of its own quarterfinals—but that whomever wins still has to get to the final to have a realistic shot.

I’m pretty sure the world spun off its axis sometime yesterday, because my mother-in-law is now contributing to the blog. She told us she read on The Sports Network that the Dutchmen were predicted to win 79-64. I told her that was crazy, she must have seen a box score from late in the second half. But it appears she was right. Of course let’s not get carried away pounding The Sports Network on its back. That’s the website, after all, that picked the Dutchmen to finish last in the CAA way back in November.

As for March, maybe it’s a good thing Hofstra didn’t finish sixth after all. That Towson thrashing of Drexel looked real familiar. And hey, Drexel, thanks for nuking my CAA tournament bracket! I felt pretty good two games in, not so much after four games. You know, a lot like I feel on the first day of the NCAA Tournament.

And don’t forget this afternoon’s potentially epic Old Dominion game is on MSG2-Plus, which I’ve never heard of and which apparently Cablevision customers don’t get (I’m pretty sure that’s ironic, in that it’s not ironic at all, since Cablevision runs MSG) However, it appears as if the game will be carried on Channel 14, otherwise known as the Channel That Killed TV Guide. Seriously, when was the last time you opened up a TV Guide or checked out the TV listings in the local paper?

Anyway…lastly, stop by for another story around noon or so, this one in which Darius Burton talks about the task of winning at least three games in as many days in a postseason tournament. Burton, of course, was the point guard on the 1993-94 Dutchmen, who won the ECC Tournament by winning three games in three days—a feat unmatched by a Hofstra team before or since.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com. And join the Defiantly Dutch group at Facebook today!

NIT-picking Stony Brook

Marcus Henry of Newsday gave me a run for my money as the most optimistic person about a Long Island basketball program last week when he surmised in a blog that Stony Brook—whom the Flying Dutchmen play tonight at Pritchard Gymnasium—could parlay a win over Hofstra into a breakout season and a possible berth in the NIT.

But while the Seawolves are shaping up to be much better this year—and not a moment too soon for coach Steve Pikiell, who entered this season 20-67 in his first three seasons—they’d have to go from (almost) worst (Stony Brook finished eighth in the nine-team America East last year via a tiebreaker over Maine) to first, and then lose in the conference tournament, to make the NIT.

When it invited 40 teams from 2002-2006, the NIT was a viable alternative for low-major teams left out of the Big Dance. Those fields featured little-known schools such as Tennessee Tech, Wagner, Eastern Washington, Austin Peay, Fairfield and Denver as well as America East schools Boston University and Northeastern and former Atlantic Sun member Georgia State. The NIT took another step towards including deserving low-majors in 2006, when it began to award an automatic bid to regular season conference champions who didn’t win their conference tourney.

But 2006 was also the year the NCAA bought the NIT to end a five-year legal battle between the two sides. Not surprisingly, the NCAA didn’t wait long to begin pushing around the little guy. The NCAA dropped the field back to 32 teams in 2007, ostensibly because it’s easier to schedule four eight-team brackets.

Of course, the teams left on the outside looking in are the smallest Davids. Counting automatic bids, the NIT invited 17 non-BCS schools in 2007 and 20 in 2008, right in line with the average from 2002 through 2006, when 116 of the 200 invitees were non-BCS schools. But the at-large bids to the NIT the last two years—12 in 2008, 10 in 2007—have come almost exclusively from the power mid-major conferences.

(As an aside, I hate further breaking down the mid-major conferences and schools into major mid-majors and mid mid-majors, because that just further encourages the BCS schools to take bigger and bigger pieces of the pie and softens the impact of the inevitable day that the NCAA Tournament is for the Big Six only and the rest of us are rooting for our alma maters to win the I-AA national title in the NIT. So please forgive me and let’s move on.)

So even before taking into account the minimal preseason expectations for Stony Brook, the Seawolves have a long way to go—even longer than Hofstra, which plays in one of those power mid-major conferences and reached the NIT despite sputtering to the finish line in 2007—to sniff the NIT.

On the other hand… those of us who went to school in western Nassau should be familiar with the encouragement Stony Brook fans are feeling right about now. Like Hofstra, Stony Brook has proven far better than initially expected in producing the best non-conference record in its conference. And like Hofstra, Stony Brook is clicking with a handful of new faces.

I’m not sure if tonight’s game is the beginning of an authentic rivalry—even after last year’s win at Hofstra, Stony Brook is 4-17 all-time against the Flying Dutchmen—but it should be an entertaining contest between a pair of teams eager to prove their early success is not a fluke.

This may just be blog bias talking, but Hofstra would seem to have more at stake: In addition to the historic dominance of the Seawolves, the Dutchmen made the leap from the hunters to the hunted with the impressive win over Towson Saturday. The Dutch debuted in the Collegeinsider.com mid-major top 25 at no. 19 this week, a 22-spot jump from a week ago. People are watching. Another win tonight and the bandwagon may even begin to get a little more crowded.

If you’re going, see you there. I’ll be the guy yelling about Setauket native Rob Ogden. It’ll just be me and the wife as Sully Ray had to cancel. Apparently, he’s swamped with work at his job and in his house. Employed AND a home owner. What year does he think this is, 2005?

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com.