Postgame Buffet: Queens

My wife and I actually ate at a Chinese buffet last night, before I came up with the "Postgame Buffet" name. Is this irony?

I’m trying something a little new this year with post-game recaps, which I’ll explain in the official tip-off post coming later today. Of course the official tip-off post is arriving after the Flying Dutchmen have already played a (fake) game, but that’s how I roll here. Anyway, the first-ever Postgame Buffet, which is a better term for five postgame thoughts!

1.) We’re better than West Virginia! The Flying Dutchmen were never seriously threatened in a 71-57 win over Queens, a victory that snapped that epic 46-year losing streak against the Knights. Of course, exhibition games are inherently no-win propositions for the home Division I team—margin of victory is irrelevant when you’re supposed to win—and the real goal is getting out healthy. But beating Queens sure beats the alternative, which is losing like West Virginia, Butler, Arizona and Utah did to lower division opponents this week.

“We talked about it throughout the week, we put some of the [results] up on the bulleting board,” Mo Cassara said. “I think this time of year teams are very susceptible to that…especially with a lot of new faces. There’s a lot of good teams out there, there’s so much parity in college basketball and there’s a couple kids out there [for] Queens tonight that played really, really well and you’re going to see that. Obviously you’re a little nervous, but we [delivered] the message to our team and ultimately we found a way to win and hopefully we’ll use this to help us get better.”

2.) Cassara has been raving about Stevie Mejia (that’s M-E-J-I-A, idiot blogger guy) for more than a year now, and the Rhode Island transfer did not disappoint in his initial impression. Mejia wasn’t perfect—he had four turnovers and was just 5-of-9 from the free throw line—but he had 10 points, nine assists and five rebounds in a team-high 36 minutes. That latter figure was especially notable because a Hofstra point guard played 36 or more minutes just twice last season—both by Brad Kelleher and his second marathon effort was in the overtime classic against William & Mary. While he lived up to his reputation as a true point guard by taking just four shots—one of which was a 20-footer as time expired in the first half—he was aggressive in driving to the basket and ended up leading the Dutchmen in both free throws and free throw attempts.

He also displayed some gritty point guard tenacity: Early in the second half, Mejia had the ball stolen from him as he dribbled up the court, but he hustled back and knocked a Queens pass out of bounds underneath the Knights’ basket. All the caveats about an exhibition apply, but Mejia did nothing to discourage the notion he’s going to provide two years of stability at point guard, which is two more stable years than the Dutchmen have had since Carlos Rivera graduated.

“Definitely felt good just playing basketball against somebody, especially after sitting out the whole year,” Mejia said. “Could barely sleep [Friday] night.”

3.) Four other players spent at least 20 minutes on the court. Mike Moore scored a game-high 20 points and led the Dutchmen with seven rebounds in 29 minutes, David Imes had six points and six rebounds in 28 minutes, Nathaniel Lester had 13 points and five rebounds (and one inexplicable technical foul) in 27 minutes in his first game action since Tom Pecora’s finale in March 2010 and Shemiye McLendon put an early grip on sixth man duties by scoring six points and impressing on both sides of the ball in 24 minutes.

The Dutchmen employed an interesting three-man rotation at center, with 6-foot-7 freshman Moussa Kone drawing the start and scoring four points and pulling down four rebounds in 19 solid minutes. Sophomore Stephen Nwaukoni was scoreless and had four fouls, three rebounds and two blocks in 13 minutes. And 6-foot-10 junior college transfer Bryant Crowder put on the most eye-opening show with 12 points—including 10 in the second half—with four rebounds and two blocks in 17 minutes. Crowder was 4-of-6 in the second half, delivered a thunderous one-handed slam off a Mejia inbounds pass and seemed to grow more comfortable on the court by the minute.

“I thought Bryant did some really good things,” Cassara said. “He certainly has an offensive mind. He attacked the basket and made a couple nice plays and he’s got great length, as you saw, and great athleticism. If he can bring some of that to the defensive end, I think he’s really going to help us win some games.”

4.) In addition to finally acquainting myself with tempo-free statistics and, in particular, points per possession (the unofficial figures from the exhibition: Hofstra 1.04 points per possession in 68 possessions, Queens 0.81 points per possession in 70 possessions), I’m also going to do my best to keep track of how each lineup fares. I figure that’ll be far easier during home games than road games, but we’ll see how it turns out.

As for Saturday, it’s interesting to note that four players were on the court for each of the Dutchmen’s big runs. The lineup of Moore-Meija-Crowder-Imes-McLendon engineered an 8-2 run in a span of 3:18 late in the first half that extended the Dutchmen’s lead to 27-18 while the quintet of Imes-Moore-Crowder-McLendon-Lester authored a 10-2 run over 1:53 late in the second half that gave Hofstra its biggest lead at 67-48. As noted multiple times already, it’s tough to read too much into exhibitions, but the presence of Crowder and McLendon on the court for the game-deciding runs is certainly a good sign for a Dutchmen team for whom depth is a question.

5.) The margin of victory was a comfortable one, but for much of the game the Dutchmen were as raw as the calendar might suggest. They were just 16-of-23 from the free throw line, 3-of-15 from 3-point land and allowed a handful of mini-runs by Queens as well as six offensive rebounds by the Knights in the second half. So Cassara won’t lack for things to hammer home this week before the real opener against Long Island.

“All three of these guys in here tonight had one or two players where they were out of position and they know that,” Cassara said as he was flanked at the postgame press conference by Moore, Mejia and Lester. “We’ve just got to be solid. I talked to our team about just being solid. It’s team defense and the second thing would be rebounding. If we do those things, the offense will come. We’re going to make more shots, we’re going to make more free throws, we’re going to make some better plays, we’re going to do some different things offensively that we just didn’t do tonight. That will come in time, but we’ve got to work on those things to have a chance against a very good LIU team.”

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

Touch of Madness

Excuse to post Night Ranger for the win!

While dozens, if not hundreds, of schools of all sizes either opened the college basketball season with Midnight Madness-esque festivities last Friday night—or are planning a similarly themed party at some point in the preseason, a la Iona tonight and Stony Brook next week—Mo Cassara and the Flying Dutchmen are getting underway in a low-key fashion. The first practice of 2011-12 came and went late last Friday afternoon with nary an undergrad nailing a half-court shot and having his tuition paid for by ESPN and his books covered by Dickie V.

And other than the season ticket holder meet-and-greet scheduled for next Thursday, practice will continue unfolding in perfectly routine fashion leading up to the season opener against Long Island three weeks from tonight. Cassara and the marketing staff at Hofstra figure their efforts are better utilized focusing on filling the Arena for that rare Friday night home game and using that as a springboard to a season that features a program-record 17 home games rather than on an event long on filler and short on substance.

That’s not to say Midnight Madness won’t someday actually arrive at Hofstra (those of a certain age—mine—will recall that Midnight Madness in the Jay Wright Era didn’t actually include basketball). But holding Midnight Madness now would be like planning an extension on a house whose foundation has barely been poured. The program made great strides expanding its heretofore meager fan base last year, but there’s still work to be done retaining the students and other newcomers to the bandwagon last year.

Plus, you don’t need Midnight Madness to go a little mad. For one thing, these realignment rumors will make anyone go nutty. How about Stuart Rabinowitz, that noted sports fan who is less than two years removed from begging Mike Francesa to get Hofstra out of the CAA and into the Atlantic 10, not only serving as the president of the CAA Council of Presidents/Chancellors but, per the New York Times, cold-calling Charlotte, George Washington, Richmond and Boston University to see if they’d like to join the CAA?

As the kids say: What is up with that? I mean, geez, two of those schools play that dreaded brand of I-AA football. What does Rabinowitz say to 2008 national champion Richmond as well as Charlotte, which will begin I-AA play in 2013? “I was just kidding, CAA football is awesome!”

I half-think Rabinowitz’ new gig is just his way of paying homage to horror movies past and present: “We all go a little mad sometimes.”

Anyway, Rabinowitz suddenly emerging as a member of the CAA’s inner circle is just one of the reasons I’m a little less WHOOHOO WE’RE GOING TO THE A-10 SEE YA CAA!!!! than I was a few weeks ago.

Saner, smarter people than me (line forms to the left) believe the CAA will emerge from realignment stronger than it is right now—your good friend and mine Mike Litos reminded us recently that Tom Yeager, with his conference on tilt, managed to gut and forever weaken the America East 11 years ago—and that it will be proactive in the process, not reactive, even if it is quiet right now.

As much as Southern Bias drives me freaking crazy, what good would it do Hofstra as well as Northeastern and Drexel—two more northeast schools now putting all their eggs in the basket of men’s basketball—to leave the CAA if it means taking a step down? As one of those saner, smarter people said to me recently: If the A-10 ends up losing Xavier, Dayton and Temple to the Big East or an off-shoot of it, who wants to end up in what is left of the A-10?

No matter how it shakes out, I still firmly believe the CAA and the rest of the Division I landscape will look far different 12 months from now, which creates a weird purgatory for 2011-12—for the league as well as the Flying Dutchmen.

A spate of graduations and the defection of a certain coach (sniff) means a regression for the CAA is likely and that one bid is all the league will get come March. The good news there is the CAA is more wide open than usual: Drexel is the preseason pick to finally overcome Southern Bias on the first Monday of March, but the Dragons are far from an overwhelming favorite. It’s the type of year in which just about everyone has a touch of madness when it comes to evaluating their chances at winning the CAA—even the fans of the team picked to finish eighth!

Believe it or not, eighth place ISN’T seven spots lower than I would have picked the Dutchmen, It’s a smidge lower than my projection—my ample gut is saying seventh, for some reason—but a perfectly reasonable one given how little we know about this team.

The Dutchmen are adjusting to life without Charles Jenkins and will field a starting five that has spent far more time together in practice than on the court. The lineup against Long Island will likely include two incumbent starters from last year in Mike Moore and David Imes, two players who were in the program but redshirted last season in Stevie Mejia and Nat Lester (who is going to sweep the balloting for the “Holy crap didn’t that guy play against David Robinson?” award) and JUCO transfer Bryant Crowder.

While actual experience together is a concern, the collective maturity of the starters is not. Moore, Mejia and Lester are all five years removed from high school while Imes prepped following high school and is four years removed from his graduation. Other returnees Dwan McMillan, Shemiye McLendon, Stephen Nwaukoni and Matt Grogan have all bought into the Cassara system and will be valuable leaders this season in helping four newcomers adjust to Division I.

This team is going to be better than people think and will feature at least one and maybe two first- or second-team All-CAA players. It’s the type of year in which a seventh-place finish and an 18-15 record is a cause for celebration, or at least pursuing a CIT bid, and reason to believe the foundation—there’s that word again!—has been set for a potentially magical 2012-13 season, when the Dutchmen will welcome a loaded recruiting class that features highly touted freshmen as well as big-time Division I transfers.

Admittedly, when it comes to forecasting this season, it takes a touch of madness to think of anything beyond a middle of the pack finish for the Flying Dutchmen, at least until we get to see them in action in November. But isn’t that what this time of the year is all about—unbridled and often uncharacteristic optimism about everything?

Why can’t the league be more balanced than expected and the Dutchmen gel faster than projected? Why can’t Hofstra work in the CAA long-term? Why can’t I root for George Mason whenever the Patriots aren’t playing the Dutchmen? I’ve got a touch of madness, and until that last sentence I really didn’t want the antidote.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

Media Day For The Soul

Whoohoo! Prospectuses! (Who knew? That actually is the plural of prospectus)

Media days would seem to be an unusual source of inspiration and self-affirmation, but I’m an odd duck even by the standards of unpaid sportswriters. So I decided yesterday, after Hofstra’s first media day for the men’s and women’s basketball teams, that when I write my first book that anybody outside my immediate family reads, I’m going to title it “Media Days For The Soul.”

I was fretting all week over Media Day because I felt wholly unprepared for it. I’ve been buried in copy writing assignments, which, again, is good because it means my wife and I and our cats can eat, but it leaves little time for the passion that is Hofstra sports. I hate feeling as if the season has completely snuck up on me, even if we’ve all been counting down the days to tomorrow since the loss to Evansville in the That Which Shall Not Be Named Tournament.

I figure if Media Day was a day or two later, I would have endured the dreaded “I went there naked” dream. That’s right. Most people dream about showing up to a final exam naked, I worry I’ll dream about showing up to a media day naked. Normal I am not.

Anyway, as is usually the case with writers who can’t get out of their own heads, my fears were unfounded. Media Day was a smash hit from start to finish. Walking into the Arena felt like slipping on an old pair of shorts or sweats. It was kind of like the first day of school, with familiar faces saying hello and new faces introducing themselves and everyone excited for the months to come even if nobody knows what is going to happen.

Collecting a bunch of interviews in one place for usage over the next few weeks, meanwhile, reminded me of the infant days of my sportswriting career and attending press conferences with one-on-one opportunities at Shea Stadium (Google it Crain!). Getting a bunch of stuff in one sitting is reinvigorating, makes me feel as if I accomplished something and negates most of that whole “season snuck up on me” vibe.

It was a big-time event put on by Hofstra and the sports information department of Stephen Gorchov, Jim Sheehan and Len Skoros and an essential addition for a school that wants to produce big-time basketball teams.

“Basketball is very important to Hofstra,” Jack Hayes said in his opening remarks. “We will do everything we can to remain competitive and to continue to build our basketball programs. The runs that we have had recently in men’s and women’s basketball have been very good but I think anybody that you will hear from today believes that the future of our basketball programs are the best years.”

“It’s the type of stuff that we have to continue to do,” Mo Cassara said. “We have to continue to sell what we’re so proud of. And I think we’ve got a great product here. We’ve got a lot of people that are excited about the program on and off the court and we want to keep talking about that.”

As big-time as it was, the endearingly down-home vibe we’ve come to appreciate at Hofstra remained firmly in place. For example, I can tell you I’ve never loaned a book to a professional baseball player.

“This is personal,” Krista Kilburn-Steveskey said. “The D.C. CAA one is great, but I like this atmosphere. I like how we did it. It was serious but then yet it was casual. I think it just allows for you to personally get to know players a lot better and see them in a different light and [for her] to really be able to brag about my players. I could brag about everybody. I didn’t just have to talk about Shante [Evans] like I do in the CAA. So I thought it was a home run—a complete home run.”

Good analogy. I approve.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

Flying Dutchwomen field hockey team hopes to make history against royal Monarchs

Most coaches preparing a team for a game against the top-ranked team in the country have a boilerplate of quotes and thoughts about the task ahead of them: It’s only one game. We’re not viewing it as any bigger or smaller than any other game. It’s a good opportunity but not that big a deal. We can’t look ahead and think about what it might mean to win such a game.

But Kathy DeAngelis isn’t sticking to the script as the Flying Dutchwomen field hockey team heads to Old Dominion to take on the no. 1 Lady Monarchs in the CAA opener for both schools at 5 p.m. This IS a big game. This IS a big deal. And winning it WOULD mean a lot for both the field hockey program and Hofstra.

“That’s really exciting for our program to be playing the number one team in the nation,” DeAngelis said by phone yesterday from Virginia. “The opportunity to say hey, we’re playing the number one team in the nation—I feel that excitement, it’s in the air everywhere.

“We can leave a mark—obviously for us to win this game but [it] would also be a huge, tremendous win for the university.”

No matter where Old Dominion is ranked, DeAngelis always looks forward to facing the Monarchs, who have certainly earned the moniker in field hockey. Old Dominion has won a record nine national championships and Lady Monarchs coach Beth Anders is the sport’s all-time winningest coach with 532 victories in 29 seasons at the helm.

Even by their lofty historical standards, though, the Lady Monarchs are putting together some kind of season. Old Dominion is 8-0 with seven wins against top 10 teams and has already toppled a pair of no. 1s in Maryland and North Carolina. The win over the Tar Heels last Friday catapulted Old Dominion to no. 1 in the polls for the first time in nine years. (For more on Old Dominion’s hot start, check out this story about the Lady Monarchs from the Daily Press in Virginia)

“The Old Dominion game is really the highlight of our year every year,” DeAngelis said. “Wherever they are ranked, we know that they are a tremendous team and we have great respect for their program.”

As respectful as the Dutchwomen are of Old Dominion, they’ll take the field this afternoon feeling confident and well-prepared. Hofstra, which was picked eighth in the nine-team CAA in the preseason poll of coaches, has begun to get some attention nationally thanks to a four-game winning streak that includes a win over then-no. 16 Albany as well as a potent offense that ranks fifth in the nation with 44 goals—more than the Dutchwomen scored all of last season. That creates a matchup of strengths against Old Dominion, which has outscored its opposition 27-8.

Since opening the season with a 7-1 loss at fourth-ranked UConn, the Dutchwomen have scored at least three goals in every game but one and have lost three times by a total of four goals, including an overtime defeat to Stanford, which is currently ranked eighth in the nation. Last week, the Dutchwomen had the CAA’s co-player of the week in senior forward Genna Kovar as well as the rookie of the week in freshman forward Jonel Boileau.

“They have exceeded, personally, my expectations,” DeAngelis said. “Scheduling is definitely part of that, but it’s also really exciting we’ve scored that many goals. We have so many players that can put the ball in the net and that makes us very dangerous.”

In addition, while Hofstra is 1-8 all-time against Old Dominion, 13 of the 27 players on this year’s team were on the 2009 team that upset then-no. 16 Old Dominion, 6-5, in Norfolk in 2009. And the Dutchwomen were competitive in falling 3-1 last year to a Lady Monarchs team that ended up winning the CAA and advancing to the NCAA quarterfinals.

A win today would not only be the biggest ever for the field hockey team but also one of the most notable achievements for any program at Hofstra. Only three Flying Dutch squads have ever beaten the nation’s no. 1 team—something DeAngelis plans to remind her team about in the pre-game meeting.

“To be able to play against [Old Dominion] in conference play is just huge,” DeAngelis said. “But for us, that definitely creates interest knowing that we have a chance to create some history here. I can kind of use that [today].”

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

Bits and Bytes: Seasons change!

Because posting the "Seasons Change" video would be cliche! (Freshman year of high school for the win!)

Remember when we were kids and seasons shifted gradually? You’d get a few weeks of increasingly warmer weather in May and June before the heat really kicked in at the start of summer. The warm weather would taper off in September with perhaps a last gasp or two of politically incorrect Indian summer in October before it began feeling like fall.

Nowadays, seasons change in the span of a single day. I walked my wife to her car early Thursday morning, when it felt more like the last week of school than the first. We went out to eat shortly after sunset and the weather so brisk I wondered if we’d run into some trick or treaters.

I blame the sudden shift of seasons on global warming. Or the fact that it’s always been like this but our childhood memories are what we think they were, not what they actually were. I don’t know. It’s like my very own Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or something,

Anyway, whatever the reason for the sudden seasonal shift, it was ironic, in that it was coincidental, that it happened Thursday, exactly one month before the start of college basketball practice. The dropping temperatures seemed to put the scent of hoops in the air and give us the nudge we all needed to start talking and writing about it.

Welcome back, fall, and welcome back hoops. We missed you. Now for some of the better bits and bytes you may have missed over the last few days:

—Our good friend Brian Mull penned more than 3,000 words in a two-day span and unofficially christened the season with his first Colonial X, in which he pegged Mike Moore as one of the 10 best players in the CAA. He’s right, of course, but he’s missing nine other Flying Dutchmen. We’ll give him a pass, although he once again disrespected Dutch Nation (snort) by picking Hofstra eighth in his predictions.

Mull takes one for the team by becoming the first reporter to put predictions to paper, but the task of picking the CAA won’t get any easier in the next four or six weeks. Drexel and George Mason are pretty easy picks in the top two—pick the order, we won’t argue either way—and William & Mary, Old Dominion and VCU are good bets for three through five in some order. Put everyone else in a hat, even Towson, and you’ve got as good a shot of picking six through 12 as you do if you put actual thought into it. Which we’ll do at some point before tipoff, because it’s fun to have something with which to laugh at me in March!

—Speaking of Mull, congratulations to the former PGA Tour caddie on winning the Wilmington City Amateur golf championship Sunday for the third time in five years. Dude does it all. Best beat writer in the CAA, provided excellent and reasoned coverage of Hurricane Irene, chips in on high school coverage in Wilmington, rescuer of stray cats from burning buildings. I may have made that last one up. But seriously, as someone whose athletic career “peaked” around 16, congrats. And props to the Star-News for not making Mull write about himself, like I had to as the de facto sports editor of the Class of 1991 yearbook. “Last-place finisher Jerry Beach tried hard and his Mom loves him very much.”

—Where was I? Oh right. Mike Litos, who also annually hates Hofstra by refusing to pick the Dutchmen first in his predictions, identified the Dutchmen as the team with the toughest “four in eight” schedule. Every CAA team plays four games between Jan. 21-28, and as I noted in my review of Hofstra’s schedule, the Dutchmen’s “four in eight” seems to have been scripted by someone still trying to stick it to Tom Pecora. At William & Mary, at VCU, home for Mason and at Northeastern. Only good thing about the travel is the Virginia trip takes place during Intersession, so there won’t be any back and forth. Still, that is a brutal stretch. SOUTHERN BIAS!!!!

—While we obsess over the season still to come, Mo Cassara and staff are looking ahead to 2012-13 and beyond and just landed promising power forward Jimmy Hall, a senior at national powerhouse St. Anthony’s. Adam Zagoria and Zach Braziller both profiled Hall following his decision. As always with recruiting, I’ll link to what other people—usually Zagoria and Braziller—write once there’s some actual hard news (not this whole “Joe Blow identifies Hofstra as one of the 317 schools he’s heard from” business), because they’re good at it and then refrain from writing anything else until the players are actually on campus, See the Malik Nichols saga for more.

—And finally, a long-overdue recommendation to check out the blog produced by my good friend Joe Suhoski, whom you might know better as @VABeachRep, whom in turn you might know better as that other guy on Twitter who likes Scrubs and Extreme as much as I do. Joe made his press box debut this weekend at the Old Dominion-Hampton football game (Football? What’s that? #ThanksStu) and heeded my advice to be seen and not heard (I think he’d stopped reading by the time I channeled Dr. Cox and wrote of journalism “Get out while you still can!”) so make sure to check out his blog, where he writes about CAA football (grrr) and, of course, Scrubs.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

Likely demise of the Big East is likely big news for Hofstra

When the dominoes stop falling, odds are good the Atlantic 10 will be Hofstra's new athletic home.

This gives me an alibi five, 10 or 15 Septembers from now, when we’re all sitting around with our robotic overlords waxing poetic about where we were when college basketball as we knew it began changing. Now I can say I was at my laptop writing a piece about how it would impact Hofstra instead of declaring I was watching “Gilmore Girls” on something called a SoapNet, which may actually end up outlasting the current incarnation of the Big East.

Shut up. In the words of Chris Turk: “Mothers and daughters: They speak so fast but they speak so true.”

Anyway, the news Saturday afternoon that Pittsburgh and Syracuse have applied for membership in the Atlantic Coast Conference and that they will be welcomed into the ACC as soon as today is finally the domino for which we’ve been waiting to fall. The inevitable, football-fueled renovation of Division I in which four superconferences lord over everyone else has begun.

There will be a lot of speculation over how the new Division I will look, an exercise in which we will gladly partake very soon, as well as a lot of lamenting over how today represents the end of the innocence for college athletics. There will be none of that here.

Is the college sports landscape changing for the worse? Of course. Is it disappointing that money trumps tradition? Of course. But money has run the world since the dawn of time, so it’s just wasted pixels to wail and moan over how wrong it will be to see Jim Boeheim, who was dourly stalking the sideline at Syracuse before there was even a Big East, in unfamiliar arenas in Durham and Chapel Hill and Miami (snicker snicker snort snort).

And college athletics hasn’t been innocent in decades. The good ol’ black and white days featured point shaving at the Mecca. Sam Gilbert paved the way for the Nevin Shapiros of the world even as John Wooden constructed a dynasty and an impeccable reputation at UCLA. The world has always been impure and it will keep turning. A generation from now someone will bemoan how wrong it is that Syracuse or Pitt left its ACC tradition behind to join the Big 120. Spare me.

Now for the good stuff: How this all shakes out and how, in particular, it impacts Hofstra. What, you thought I cared about the Big East all of a sudden? While most of the talk about the superconferences has been centered on what would happen once the Big XII blew up, for our purposes, we’ve only focused on the Big East and how it would shape Hofstra’s future.

Had the Big East been a proactive force in creating the four superconferences, it would have meant more purgatory for Hofstra. Now that the Big East is about to be picked apart like a Thanksgiving turkey on Black Friday, there’s an endgame resolution in sight that gets Hofstra out of the Southern Bias Conference.

People smarter than me—line forms to the left—insist this process will take years to unfold and that there’s no guarantee the Big East is done as a football/basketball powerhouse. As usual, I will insist that people smarter than me are wrong.

This time though I might be right, because if there’s one thing we can all agree upon, it’s that these conference changes aren’t going to drag out. It took 21 months for Boston College to leave the Big East for the ACC. My guess, with the stakes even higher during this round of realignment, is that Pittsburgh and Syracuse will be in the ACC next fall along with two other schools. The Pac-12 will be the Pac-16, the SEC will also have 16 teams and the Big 10 will be coming up with a new design that subliminally reminds us its names is very, very inaccurate.

The Big East barely had a football pulse with Pitt and Syracuse. It’s possible the league will still try and maintain its BCS standing by poaching a chunk of what is left of the Big XII, but according to my admittedly meager math skills, 64 does not divide equally into five. The ACC just finished off the Big East.

Who knows which of the BCS schools ends up where, but for Hofstra’s purposes, the path to the Atlantic 10—at least from where I sit, where I am, again, just having some fun speculating—just got a lot clearer. Here’s a three-step process that finally gets Hofstra into the conference it has longed after for decades.

1.) The A-10 will be targeted by the non-football Big East schools, which will look to strengthen what will still be one of the best basketball leagues in the country. The following is also an almost perfect alignment because every school but one is a Catholic university:

BIG EAST

Dayton (A-10)

Saint Louis (A-10)

Temple (A-10)

Xavier (A-10)

DePaul

Georgetown

Marquette

Notre Dame

Providence

St. John’s

Seton Hall

Villanova

2.) The current A-10 alignment will take another hit when the CAA finally quits with the Boston-to-Atlanta charade and solidifies itself as a Virginia-based, mid-Atlantic behemoth by taking two A-10 schools—including the school that jumpstarted the whole round of conference realignment that landed Hofstra in the CAA in the first place—and a Southern Conference school. This also further cements the CAA as the best Division I-AA conference in the land.

CAA

Charlotte (A-10)

Richmond (A-10)

Appalachian State (Southern Conference)

Delaware

George Mason

Georgia State

James Madison

UNC Wilmington

Old Dominion

Towson

VCU

William & Mary

3.) The Atlantic 10, now down to eight, invites the CAA’s three northern outsiders as well as Boston University, whose long-term home has long been tied to Northeastern’s. This also keeps the Atlantic 10 located ENTIRELY along the Atlantic seaboard—what a concept!—which will be no small consideration as the recession enters its second decade.

ATLANTIC 10

HOFSTRA (CAA)

Drexel (CAA)

Northeastern (CAA)

Boston U. (America East)

Duquesne

Fordham

George Washington

LaSalle

Massachusetts

Rhode Island

St. Bonaventure

Saint Joseph’s

At the very least, this new alignment makes for some juicy immediate rivalries. Imagine getting to see Chaz Williams and Halil Kanacevic at least once a year, or Tom Pecora twice a year. And I’d love to see what the Northeastern student section would come up with to greet Duquesne and ex-NU coach Ron Everhart, who famously took everything to Pittsburgh with him except the bathroom sinks at Matthews Arena.

Of course, there are many wrinkles to this plan. Notre Dame probably ends up in the Big 10 if it decides to give up independence in football. Some of the CAA schools may be lured by the idea of playing lower-level I-A football, which seems like an awful, awful idea if all the power will be consolidated in the four superconferences. But it could happen, which would turn a place like Conference USA into a potential destination for the likes of Old Dominion, James Madison and Georgia State.

The last step—and the only one we care about—is fraught with complications. I doubt very much Fordham has any interest in welcoming Hofstra to the A-10, and in the past the A-10 has been about as interested in Hofstra as the homecoming queen was in me 20-odd years ago.

But the A-10 may be in survival mode in a matter of days and weeks and have no choice but to welcome some new dance partners to the floor. Boston College’s departure to the ACC in 2003 unleashed a torrent of realignment in just a matter of months. By November, the Big East had lured six schools from Conference USA while Charlotte and Saint Louis agreed to leave C-USA for the A-10.

The dominoes are going to fall even quicker this time around. My suggestion, if you’ve been putting off a trip to Richmond for the CAA Tournament, is to book that trip now. Because if I was a betting man—you’ll get that analogy in a second!—I’d wager that by March 2013, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll only have to go to Atlantic City to see Hofstra in its conference tournament.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

Never Forget

The phone rang a few minutes before 9 a.m. 10 years ago this morning. As usual at such an early (for me) hour, I slept through the first few rings, and by the time I answered the phone the caller had already hung up. I looked at the caller ID and was a bit bemused why my college roommate John was calling me at this unusual time of day.

I was going to roll over and go back to sleep but I had to be up shortly to meet a freelance client, so I figured I’d call Tom and make sure we were still on schedule. He answered, I said hello.

“Are you watching TV?” he asked.

That was the first hint something was not right. I put on the TV, saw the Twin Towers with gaping, fiery holes and realized why John was calling: Our friend Greg worked in one of the Twin Towers.

I called John, whose voice was filled with an urgency and a worry I’d never heard before. He was trying to get in touch with anyone who might have spoken to Greg so that John could call back Greg’s Mom and let her know he was safe.

The next hour or so was spent fielding and making phone calls. Another friend John needed me to call his parents in California to let them know he was OK—he worked in a government building in Brooklyn—and that he was heading home as soon as possible. At some point I called my Dad, because at that point I felt like I was 27 going on seven and I needed to know everything was going to be OK, even though I knew our definition of OK had just changed forever.

My Dad provided some measure comfort, at least until the plane crashed into the Pentagon and his demeanor grew far more somber. “Well shit,” he said. “I guess I should go watch this.”

Another good friend from college, Rob, worked in the Pentagon (I later found out he only had Pentagon access, that he didn’t work full-time there). At some point I raced for the bathroom, unsure which end of my body was going to release itself first.

Tom and I, each in a complete daze, eventually agreed to meet at a gas station by my house so that I could give him my suddenly meaningless assignment. We gazed at the cruelly blue sky as we stood next to each other on an unusually warm September day.

“This is our Pearl Harbor,” he said.

On the way home I heard the second of the Twin Towers fall on the radio. “The Twin Towers…ARE GONE,” said WPLJ’s Todd Pettengill.

Shortly after I got home I found out Greg was fine, that he was walking to work at 7 World Trade Center when the attacks happened and that he ended up at a friend’s apartment in the city. I drove to the office of the weekly newspaper I was working at in Suffolk—I’d just taken a job as the sports editor—and ended up talking to Greg for one of the stories in our Thursday edition. There was no sports section Thursday.

Around mid-afternoon, I was overcome with an exhaustion I’d never felt before or since. I could barely keep my eyes open. It would be weeks before I could sleep normally again, and months before I didn’t wake up with a sense of dread every Tuesday morning.

I drove home around sunset and passed by a group of little kids riding their bikes in the street. I wished I was that young again, and was glad I wasn’t, because I knew those kids would never have the childhood I had. How old are they now? Seventeen, eighteen? They don’t know of a world in which every little hiccup—a power outage or the sound of far-off sirens or a breaking news bulletin—doesn’t automatically conjure up images of terrorism. All they know is a world in which no horror is unimaginable.

It’s hard to believe it’s 10 years today, and how much more recent Sept. 11, 2001 feels than Sept. 10, 2001.

Somehow, miraculously, nobody I knew died in the terrorist attacks. Never forget the 2,977 who did, including the 13 Hofstra graduates who perished at the World Trade Center: Lt. Glenn Wilkinson, Frederick Varrachi, Neil Levin, Alisha Levin, Edward Mardovich, Andrew Stern, Courtney Walcott, Alok Menta, Jeffrey Dingle, Richard Fitzsimmons, Noell Maerz, Glenn Winuk and Julie Lynne Zipper.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.