Following Up On Thursday

A few more notes:

The calendar is becoming more clear. Midnight Madness, again, will be on the night of Friday the 17th. The next BP65 will come out less than a week later. The following BP65 will come out 17 weeks before Selection Sunday (March 15th, 2009), which will be November 16th (six weeks from today). They will then continue every Sunday until the week of February 9th.

As for the first games of the year, the match-ups for the season-opening Coaches vs Cancer Classic are now set. The full bracket is here. As we know with these tournaments, we often get a bunch of lame regions, with the home team being protected with easy opponents. In this case, Michigan gets an especially easy route. We will get no sense of how good Michigan is until they play in Madison Square Garden on November 20th. Duke might get a fight from Houston, and UCLA will have to be careful with Miami of Ohio, but the only real potential upset I see is in Carbondale, where SIU will be tested by UMass. Barring some very strange turn of events, however, we will be set for a UCLA-Duke final. And that will be a great game, to be sure. But we can't overlook the consolation game. Whichever team wins that game, be it Michigan, SIU or UMass (or even possibly a mini-cinderella, like Houston), will find itself with a good win or two for their Tournament resume. Duke and UCLA and playing to strengthen their argument for a #1 seed in March. And as we all know, it's a lot more fun to think about who will get into the Tournament, and who will be left at home. It's not hard to see the aforementioned trio, as well as Houston and Miami of Ohio, finding their way onto the bubble in February and March. You can't underestimate good wins over other bubble teams during November.

Looking back at Marquette for a moment, here is a nice feature on Buzz Williams and his Golden Eagles. While there are obviously questions about the head coaching abilities of Williams (his only season as a head coach was a 14-17 season with the mighty New Orleans Privateers of the Sun Belt), those will get answered in time. Williams has got to be grateful that he got dropped into such a good situation at Marquette. Jerel McNeal and Dominic James eschewed the draft to make one more run at a Big East title. Throw in Wes Matthews and Lazar Haywood and you've got a heck of a starting lineup no matter who is playing center. The only question I have is depth. Marquette probably will have the best backcourt in the Big East, but they're going to be weak in the paint unless some player from last year's bench makes some huge strides (the incoming recruiting class is pretty weak, so I wouldn't expect any freshmen to make a huge impact on the 2008-09 season). So Marquette's best strategy will be to run on offense, and use pressure defense on the perimeter. It's a strategy that Duke employed last year with great success. But Duke is so deep that they have McDonald's All-Americans serving up gatorade and towels on the bench. With a weak recruiting class and a bench that wasn't that deep to begin with, is Marquette going to be able to keep this up without wearing out? What if Jerel McNeal gets hurt again (as he did two season ago)? What if Dominic James wears down again and becomes an inefficient shooter late in the season due to heavy minutes and the fact that his playing style causes him to take a beating on the floor (as happened last season)? Marquette just feels a lot like a team that will start out very strong, but fade down the stretch.

So what about the future in Marquette? Even though the incoming freshman class is weak, Buzz Williams is known as a strong recruiter. His first full recruiting class will be a strong one that features three of Rivals.com's Top 100 2009 players. It's impossible for a recruiting class to come right in and replace James, McNeal and Matthews (who are all going to be seniors this season), but it will be a good start. The question will be whether Williams will be able to continue to bring in those types of classes (a lot of coaches put together a good inaugural recruiting class, but struggle to ever match that again), and whether he can be as strong of an in-game coach as Tom Crean was. As usual, I'm not going to make predictions about things I can't possibly predict (unlike pretty much everybody else on the internet). We'll just have to see how this plays out.