Basketball pre season predictions

[infofan]

I came across the first of the preseason college "rags" and found some interesting notes. Read Sporting News, Athlon, and Lindy's basketball previews. The most surprising thing was found in Sporting News, where they classify the MAC as a High major! SN seperates conferences into High (ACC, big 10, Big east, C-USA, Missouri Valley, MAC, Pac 10, etc), Mid majors( Big west, horizon, colonial, etc) , and Low majors ( Big sky, ivy, OVC, SWAC, Meac, etc). I wont debate their clasifications but definately surprising.

Sporting News picks us to finish 2nd to OU. Puts Zeke on 1st team all MAC.

Athlon also picks UA as runner ups to OU, playing in NIT.

Lindys picks UA 4th behind OU, Miami, and Can't. They say well greatly miss Humpty as point guard.

The consensus pick OU has 20 home games this year, having taken Walsh, Wooster, and St Francis off our schedule. While Basset is gone they dont confirm anyone else ( even Kellogg) having left the team.

[Hilltopper]

I predict that we will win some games we should lose and we will lose some games we should win. I predict that we will be playing at the Q for a trip to the big dance in March. Its going to be a great ride and I will enjoy it thoroughly.

[RowdyZip]

Rivals has

1 Akron

2 Ohio

3 Miami

4 Can't

5BG

6 Buffalo

It's a featureless boring, unresearched article (as usual), and I can't post a link because I'm on my phone. It does say OU has more upside, but the Zips are the "safe pick" as conference champs. Curiously, the only Zip on their All-MAC teams is B Mcknight as a 2nd team forward. Anyone know whwn MAC media day is?

[Quickzips]

http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/basketball/ne...=rivals-1139749

Hard to know what to make out of the East this year. So many teams with so many question marks. You look at the guys who are no longer around that were big contributors from last year and it is actually pretty astonishing. Bassett, Van Kempen, McKnight, Conyers, Hitchens, Evans, Singletary, Simpson, McKee, Pierce, Betts, Hayes, Fletcher, Polk just to name a few. Can't and Buffalo I think have been hit the hardest by the losses as both teams lost at least 5 key players from their rotation. It makes it very difficult to make any sort of reasonable predictions about the conference race going into the season. I do think that Akron and Ohio will probably end up as the top two teams, though I could just as easily see Can't re-loading again and challenging for the East title. I expect to see Buffalo, Miami and Bowling Green bringing up the rear in whatever order. Buffalo just has too many people to replace. Bowling Green was clearly the worst team in the East last year and I haven't seen where they've added much for this year. Miami really took a step back last year and now that they lose their best player overall in Hayes and their best post-player in Fletcher I really can't see them getting much better. Really tough to say though.

[skip-zip]

I think we've become accustomed to a few things, and I don't expect this year to be any different.

1) Akron will be good enough to win most of their conference games.

2) Ken+ will be good enough to win most of their conference games.

3) Someone else will have a nice run, and will contend also.

How this all shakes out in the last couple of weeks of the season to decide the East regular season champ is anyone's guess.