Starting Tuesday, our delightful friends in the Sun Belt, Horizon & Patriot League begin their conference championship.
Sun Belt - The Fun Belt is coming to you, live from Pensacola, where rolling a barrel down the street can cost you a fine. Look it up.
The league title was shared by Arkansas State (87th in KenPom), Troy (109th), South Alabama (115th) and James Madison (154th). Love them Dukes. Marshall finished a game back and does own a win over Arkansas State. If the top-seeds hold serve (tennis or volleyball term), this could be a lowkey fun tournament.
I think any of the top 3 can be a handful in an opening round game for someone, so it behooves the league one of those teams wins. I drove through Arkansas in October and it was quite pleasant, so I’ll say Arky State comes out of this league.
Horizon- The Whore Zone opens on campus and finishes in beautiful Indianapolis and will certainly have the most compelling basketball tournament of any of the conferences having their tourneys here.
Robert Morris, named after the financier of the Revolutionary War. He ended up in a debtors prison, so that explains a lot about American financial history. Anyway, the Governors are 152 in KenPom. Milwaukee is actually better at 136 but Bob swept the Panthers this season. And let’s face it, nobody roots for the artist formerly known as UWM.
Cleveland State and PFW are 165 and 164 in KenPom respectively. Bob has won 7 in a row and 13 of 14. They are on fire. That said, they have some weird in-league losses and that makes me hesitant to pick them. I’ll pick Cleveland State to steal a bid even though Cleveland isn’t a state unless you consider it a state of mind.
Patriot- The Patriot plays all its games at campus sites. This is a pretty terrible league. Bucknell and American split the league title, but the Bisons own a 22-point win over the Eagles after losing to them by 10 earlier in the season. This isn’t your mom’s Bucknell team of yore, though. They’re not very good.
Bucknell is 217 in KenPom, American 251. The only other schools with winning records overall are Boston and Army. Colgate could probably win this league but they’d still have a losing record.
Basically, this league is trash. Eagles eat a lot of trash, so American is the pick.
No comments:
Post a Comment