Morning Breath

Well, that was a nice start. Pity it didn't last through the first 9 days of the season.

Siena 79, Stanford 67

So I just get through praising Goods ecstatically, and he rewards me with a 2-for-12 shooting performance. Ouch. Looking at the box, you'd think it was Stanford that was the undersized small-conference team-- tons of 3-point attempts, not a lot of makes, an overall horrible shooting performance (26/71? Seriously?) and all of 3 free-throw attempts to Siena's 32.

Not having seen the game, I really can't tell if that was legit. But it seems to me that there may have been some substantial hometown reffing going on here. I'm sorry, I just have real difficulty believing that Stanford actually committed twice as many fouls as a Northeast Conference team.

Then again, a bunch of these free throws seem to have come down the stretch, so who knows, really. The game wasn't televised. Can someone work on this, please?

In any event, this is a loss that's going to sound really bad (and drop the team from the top 25) but actually not mean a ton. It's not horrible for the team's RPI, because Siena is a pretty good team in its conference that projects to win 15-20 games. It's early in the season. It's at Siena, which is something the selection committee looks pretty favorably on (scheduling moderately tough road games). It's definitely in the category of "irritating" rather than "devastating," similar to USC's loss to Mercer last weekend.

It would have been nice if Hill was healthy or Brook was available, but both of these will probably be taken into account when the committee looks at the team later in the season. The one irritating thing to me? Johnson should have known not to schedule this game in the morning. Pac-10 teams always have major issues with early games on the East Coast (see last year's NCAA tournament game for further evidence). Couldn't this have been plugged into prime time?