Texas Tech beats East Central 167-116: http://www.usatoday.com/sports/scores108/1...NCAAB850214.htm

Centenary 81 vs. Troy St. 77 Final

McNeese St. 82 vs. Louisiana-Monroe 63 Final

Tulsa 73 vs. Oklahoma St. 91 Final

Fla. International 38 vs. Washington 42, 2nd half

This hadn't been the greatest start for the SBC in OOC play..... ULM loses to McNeese State and Troy to Centenary?? The FIU loss and our loss to OSU are to teams in BCS conferences, which doesn't make them as bad, but loses nonetheless. WKU lost to Houston and so on. I wonder if the SBC will be a weak conference this season? It appeared the SBC was strengthening overall in the past few years so I hope not.

I somewhat expected a down year for the Belt. Nonetheless, we've had some pretty questionable L's.

Again...not to make excuses for some of these losses *cough,Troy,cough*...but it seems that Belt teams are missing an inordinate number of key players:

FAU - Carlos Monroe
FIU - Alex Galindo, Josue Soto
WKU - A.J. Slaughter
MTSU - Demetrius Green, Theryn Hudson
USA - Dominic Tilford
ULL - Chris Gradnigo, Emmanuel Adiefe
UNO - Kyndall Dykes
ASU - Yima Chia-Kur
UALR - Stevie Moore

These are all conference players. I'm sure that early in the season every team has to deal with injuries, suspensions and eligibility issues...but it really seems to be hitting the SBC hard. These OOC loses will probably end up killing the conference RPI and 2 bids seems unlikely again this season...however assuming all these players end up making it back, the added depth and experience from having to give minutes to guys coaches otherwise wouldn't will only make these teams stronger come conference play. FAU hung tough with Arizona and beat Santa Clara w/o Monroe...UNO with NC State w/o Dykes...this conference could be a gauntlet by January.

Perfect...so then when we all beat each other up the Belt will just be thought of as weak, when we're much stronger than our OOC record would indicate. Awesome.

Regretably...yes



You know what I'm digging recently...

No, but he can...

All we need to do is take care of business and keep improving. If we do that we will be fine. We have the athletes to play with anyone on our schedule.

I wasn't using "we" speaking about NT. I was using it to speak about the Belt. If the league is down, it will probably hurt us should we win it. If we don't win league but still have a decent season it can hurt any potential NIT or CBI bid we might be able to grab.

Let's say we have another 20 win season (three in a row) but don't win the SB Championship. How much weight will consistancy of winning count towards an NIT or CBI bid?

Your CBI bid is not just about record - it is how many tickets you can sell and if you can reach their minimum financial requirements. If we had stronger attendance last year, we would have been in.

If the CBI concerns you, get your friends to go to the games.

Hopefully quite a bit, but who knows. The CBI especially had a somewhat haphazzard way of selecting schools(the NIT seemed to mostly go by RPI)

I'll be starting my RPI and sagarin watch in about a month.

If you want to host, that is true. I'm not sure how much they considered home attendance for schools that they had as road teams first round. They WERE interested in getting good regional draws though...so if they didn't think that a Houston would be interested in a visiting NT - that would work against us.

Depends on how we get to the 20. If we beat Houston, Arkansas, NMST and the rest of OOC...go undefeated at home (which would include a win over MTSU)...maybe lose one or 2 good conference road games (WKU, USA) I say we can top out as the last team in the NCAA, but more likely an NIT bid...depending how the rest of the country and rest of the conference plays out. 20 wins used to mean a lot more...its nice, but with more OOC games...a lot against weaker opponents...I'd set a bar of 25 wins before we think post season

They made a lot of calls begging a lot of people to do this - including us if I remember correctly. I think the numbers were that you needed to pay them $30k and then keep the rest, but my memory is fuzzy. If you can make the numbers happen and you have a good-looking 20 win record, you can get in the CBI - it's all about taking the risk.