Ready or not...
Bill Koch, National Columnist
Don’t look now, but along with the calendar changing to 2012 comes the beginning of conference play from coast to coast. Teams from the Big East, Pac-12 and seemingly every club in between have opened their respective league schedules, and we can’t wait for the road upsets and head-scratching results to begin. Let’s take a look at five developments that we’ve had our eye on in between shaking off the post-New Year’s Eve blurriness.
-- The Big East is up to its usual tricks, and Seton Hall upsetting defending national champion Connecticut on Tuesday night is just the tip of the iceberg. Five teams in this week’s top 25 call the conference home, including a pair riding double-digit win streaks in No. 1 Syracuse and No. 9 Georgetown. The Hoyas won two very different types of league games in their first two tries, a 71-68 road showcase at Louisville and a 49-40 rock fight with Providence, and look to be one of the most resourceful teams that John Thompson III has fielded in recent years. Jason Clark (team-high 15.1 points per game) anchors the backcourt while the frontcourt features a gifted scorer in Hollis Thompson (47.3 percent from 3-point range), a smooth-passing big man in Henry Sims (team-high 3.7 assists per game) and a gritty rebounder in Otto Porter (7.0 boards per game).
-- With that said, the Big Ten looks even stronger.
What’s old is new again with Michigan and
Michigan State atop the standings and
Indiana turning back the clock. The Wolverines are
using their sticky 1-3-1 defense and 48.1 percent shooting to power
their rise while the Spartans have rebounded from an 0-2 start to
win 14 straight overall. The Hoosiers have notched home victories
over the No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the country, taking down Kentucky
and Ohio State, respectively, and the Buckeyes remain a threat to
capture the conference title once Jared Sullinger takes them on his
broad shoulders. Wisconsin, a team that entered
the season 155-12 at the Kohl Center under Bo Ryan, has
already lost conference home games to Iowa and Michigan State. Nine
of the league’s 12 teams already have notched double-digit
victories and none enter Wednesday under the .500 mark.
-- The West Coast Conference could be tougher at the top than any other league west of the Big XII. Its headlining trio of Gonzaga, Saint Mary’s and newcomer BYU can play with just about anybody, as the Gaels held off the Cougars in the opening skirmish on Thursday. Nobody in the country plays harder than Saint Mary’s guard Matthew Dellavedova, a 6-foot-4 Aussie who is in his third year as a starter and is the type of floor leader that all good teams possess. And the Bulldogs weren’t just sitting back and watching their two title rivals do battle. Gonzaga was busy polishing off an impressive road victory over Xavier on Saturday, the last game on a nonconference schedule that featured five opponents from the BCS.
-- The bottom of the ACC is softer than it’s ever
been as it heads into its league openers this weekend.
Boston College went just 3-6 against fellow New
Englanders during its nonconference slate, including double-digits
losses to Holy Cross (by 22), Massachusetts (by 36), Boston
University (by 14) and Harvard (by 21). Wake
Forest counts losses to Dayton, Arizona State (by 28),
Richmond and Wofford and is 302nd in the country in
rebounding. Georgia Tech has gone down to Saint
Joseph’s, Tulane, Mercer, Fordham and was mauled by Alabama
on Tuesday night. What do the College of Charleston, Coastal
Carolina, UTEP and Hawaii have in common? They’ve all beaten
Clemson this season.
-- Does any team want to win the Pac-12? It certainly doesn’t look like preseason favorite UCLA is going to live up to its advanced billing. We’ve warned you about expectations before in this column space, and the Bruins being edged by Stanford and whacked by California was just the latest in a series of early-season disappointments for Ben Howland’s crew. Not that the rest of the league has been much better – the Pac-12 is 0-12 against the AP Top 25 and 12-23 in true road games. Three teams are 2-0 through the opening weekend of league play, including a Washington club that lost to South Dakota State by 19. Yikes.
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Clemson/Smith photo courtesy Rex Brown, IPTAY Media; Izzo photo courtesy Michigan State Athletics
