Dec. 11 Power Rankings
11 December, 2006It’s becoming a bit of a cliche: Patriot League team plays power conference team. Patriot League team stays close for 20-30 minutes. Patriot League team loses by double digits in the end. The latest victims of this are Lehigh (at Miami), Colgate (at Syracuse), and Holy Cross (at Duke), but most of the league has fallen into it at some point this year. The conference is 8 games over .500 and arguably as good as it’s ever been, but still missing that signature win.
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| 1. | Holy Cross (6-3) | 1 | The Crusaders put up a good fight at Duke, controlling the flow of the game for much of the contest. Holy Cross made a much better showing than Bucknell did last year at Cameron, albeit against a weaker Duke squad. After “good showings” against Syracuse and Duke, the Crusaders have circled Dec. 19 on their calendar as an opportunity to go from moral victory to actual win against Providence. |
| 2. | Bucknell (3-5) | 2 | Despite the talk about Bucknell using Josh Linthicum and Andrew Morrison more this year, those two are getting only 5.0 and 9.7 minutes per game respectively. Instead, the Bison are going small more often, playing Abe Badmus with John Griffin and Jason Vegotsky often. Bucknell wants to play its best players often regardless of position, but using this lineup neutralizes the Bison’s natural size advantage that served them so well the last two seasons. |
| 3. | American (7-3) | 3 | The loss at Yale is big, because Bucknell and Holy Cross already won there this year. It’s early, but the Eagles have to prove that they belong among those two teams at the top of the league. |
| 4. | Army (7-2) | 5 | The Black Knights just keep winning games. They’re beating teams they should beat (NJIT this past week), but the fact that they have teams they should beat is cause enough for celebration. The way the bottom half of the Patriot League has looked so far this year, Army has a realistic chance of finishing the year in the first division. |
| 5. | Navy (7-3) | 4 | Penn is a good team and there’s no shame in losing to them, but the Mids lost a chance to make a big statement with even a close game. Additionally, having to go to double OT to beat Howard at home is not becoming of a top Patriot League team. There’s a lot of cause for optimism in Annapolis, but perhaps we should pull back the enthusiasm a bit. |
| 6. | Lehigh (4-8) | 6 | Lehigh played well in losing a wild one at Princeton, but the Mountain Hawks are in danger of becoming too accustomed to just coming up short. Bryan White has been dissappointing so far, averaging 5.2 points per game on 44.4 percent shooting. |
| 7. | Lafayette (4-6) | 8 | After playing about as badly as a team can play for a few weeks, the Leopards are suddenly back, and can possibly be over .500 when they travel to Temple at the end of December. Tonight’s battle with Columbia will help decipher if Lafayette is going to be able to compete with the mid-level Patriot League teams. |
| 8. | Colgate (4-4) | 7 | The Raiders continue to be insanely difficult to read. Todd Checovich, despite being sixth on Colgate in minutes per game, is 13th in points per game. Willie Morse is second on the team in points per 40 minutes, but still gets less playing time than Tim Pounds, Trevaron Vinson, Dan Gentile and Checovich. |
