I wrote a piece about position battles at RotoSavants. I’ve been diving back into draft prep again so I have been keeping a closer eye towards projections and depth charts as we get closer to spring training.

I also have coverage of the BracketBuster game between Siena and Butler over at SienaSaintsBlog.com from the past week which includes an interview and a scouting report on Butler’s best player.

Meanwhile, now is the time I’ll break down the CAA results and write my RushTheCourt piece for the week on the Colonial Athletic Association. Including all of the postseason tournaments, I wouldn’t be surprised if 5 teams reach postseason play for the conference.

I wrote a piece on Tuesday for RushTheCourt.net on the CAA. I’m working on those writing troubles I might have but this keeps me active in College Basketball season! Plus I tweet the piece @CAAZone, which draws a lot of views. Check it out here!

Another snowy week struck the CAA schedule. This is not a bold prediction but I guarantee we’re going to get games in the conference tournament that are the caliber of George Mason’s 82-77 overtime win over VCU on Tuesday night. Anyone who caught that game on ESPNU saw a real treat. Despite the snow, Hofstra drew a modest 893 in their game against Drexel Wednesday night. CAA Rookie and co-Player of the Week Drexel’s Chris Fouch left with an injury. Will he miss the rest of the season? Towson postponed their Wednesday night game to Thursday afternoon and gave interim-coach Brooks Lee his first career win as coach of UNC Wilmington. Meanwhile, James Madison walk-on redshirt freshman Ryan Knight was arrested for allegedly throwing snowballs at vehicles that were described as “missiles.” Meanwhile Old Dominion turned in another 20-win season, their fifth in the last six years. Unless there is more snow, the entire league will play on Tuesday night before heading into their weekend BracketBuster matchups to boost the league RPI.

I had to write the Siena recap as they fell, on National TV, to Niagara on the road. Find it here. I put an interesting fact in there about the Saints on the road this year.

Now there is zero room for error for the Saints. When we watch them at the MAAC Tournament in Albany it will determine if they are going to the NCAA tournament or hosting an NIT game. Sorry, I’m not on the bandwagon of an at-large bid even with the weak class of Pac-10 and other major conference teams. Only if they went undefeated in the regular conference season would I have given the Saints a chance. That or if there is an extremely controversial play or suspension that might not let the Saints in.

If the Saints win their BracketBuster game at Butler it might help their resume. I mean look at Siena’s profile now compared to this 2005-06 team you might remember, not much difference there.

I wrote a piece on the past week’s play at RushTheCourt for the Colonial Athletic Association as the race closes tighter and tighter. I also did some digging through the schedule and found that George Mason benefitted a lot from playing very weak opponents throughout the seven game win streak. Also changed the format up a little bit and it is worth checking out.

On SienaSaintsBlog we have done more video and are getting more and more hits. Siena came out in their alternate gold’s for the first time this year, I believe, and came out firing in last Friday’s win over Iona.

More here:

I opened a league on RotoSavants and it filled in 19 hours.

Laboring over this for a while but I finally got it done! BracketBuster piece. Thank God for editors and e-mail because I got this done right when I was about to be out of sight of internet! Plus there’s something nice to seeing your piece get released while on the train, that there might be something new in there you didn’t notice or a nice design. This one, has the nice design by the way! Check it out!

Breaking Down the Bracketbusters…

Special to RushTheCourt.  Ryan Restivo of the MAAC-based SienaSaintsBlog is the RTC correspondent for the Colonial Athletic Association. SienaSaintsBlog now features exclusive video!

The BracketBuster matchups are out, and as promised, RTC is here with some analysis of some of the top games!  Five Colonial Athletic Association teams lead the pack into these February weekend matchups. The Western Athletic Conference drew four bids and the Missouri Valley drew three.  One problem with the BracketBusters? Five of the television games will be on ESPNU, which of course means they’re not available on ESPN360.  However I’d say there are five games where you must, to quote another piece here, “quit your job and divorce your wife if that’s what it takes to watch this game live.”

Friday 2/19  (RPI)

Old Dominion (#46) @ Northern Iowa (#17)  – 7 pm on ESPN2/ESPN360

The Monarchs will travel to Cedar Rapids to play where the Panthers have won every home game by an average of 14 points per game entering this week. 6’8 UNI senior Adam Koch is a tough-to-contain inside presence, scoring a team high 12.7 points per game. 6’10 ODU senior Gerald Lee will likely be assigned to the task of guarding Koch, an he has been a beast this year for the Monarchs, shooting 53% from the field and leading the team with 14.3 points per game. The matchup to watch in this game will be to see if Old Dominion can defend Koch on the inside while keeping their shooters, junior Kwadzo Ahelegbe (11.1 ppg) and Senior Ali Farokhmanesh (team high 42 3-pointers made), at bay. Both teams are first in their respective conferences in FG percentage defense at eerily similar numbers: Old Dominion’s 39.5% FG-defense is 21st while Northern Iowa’s 39.9% ranks 37th nationally. The Monarchs have had some defensive trouble lately, trying zones at Northeastern on Saturday when facing a team with similar size and offensive weapons as the Panthers, to give up a season high 59.5% field goal percentage.

I did four more… if you want to find out those teams, you’ll have to visit RushTheCourt.net for more. That’s called a tease!

So I wrote some recaps, previews and Bracketbuster pieces on SienaSaintsBlog.com over the weekend. Siena beat St. Peter’s on the road in a tough game and then wiped the floor with Marist.

The Siena-Butler collision course? Is it possible? Butler was 37-3 at home heading into the week, when I did the research on potential games. It is official now and we knew about it at the time so we could break it at the right time. ESPN embargoes the information for going into a release from schools/sites/anything which I find ironical because there was an embargo ESPN broke once in 2007 but I digress.

My weekly CAA piece for RushTheCourt came out Monday. George Mason is atop the league at 10-1 but I would say there are five teams that could win the automatic bid and I’m not counting Drexel who has been very good as of late. Also it’s my opinion that Benny Moss at UNC Wilmington shouldn’t have been fired. Unless he committed a major NCAA violation or a crime, there are no real benefits to firing your head coach in season in college basketball.

My CAA piece was mentioned on the ESPN.com College Basketball Nation Blog. Cool!

Rush The Court checks in on the Colonial, where George Mason, Old Dominion, and Northeastern have all crowded the top of the standings.

Also my RotoSavants piece last week was: I hate drafting Derek Jeter. I think Jeter is going to hit that age, soon enough, where the production won’t help. If you add a position move, which is almost inevitable, to the outfield then how much of a great fantasy player is he? I like the new design of RotoSavants.com and everyone should check it out!

I did my weekly for RotoSavants. This time I broke down catching situations that I’m not happy at. I like Jesus Flores of the Nats and I hope he is healthy and doesn’t get hurt by the veteran presence of Ivan Rodriguez.

My weekly CAA piece went up on RushTheCourt. Old Dominion, Northeastern and George Mason are all tied for first and this week there will be a lot of good games, especially on Saturday.

Over at SienaSaintsBlog, we’re continuing the video push. We got this video up about 2 hours after the game in HD quality of Ubiles, a little obstructed, but hitting a three and the crowd goes crazy. I like our videos for their natural sound quality and even our player interview sound quality has been getting a lot better.

Oh yeah and our video is going very well so far. So much that the Times Union blog acquired video from Thursday’s Siena Time Warner broadcast.

So we made our trip to Bridgeport for the Siena-Fairfield game. So here are two of me on press row doing some work. We sat next to Matt Norlander who runs the College Hoops Journal who wrote a piece about the Saints. Nice guy, he’s from up in Connecticut, and runs a very nice site.  I got to use Matt’s laptop, the one with the ESPN logos all over it, to upload the video and that was nice.

Yes I am the one with the most hair of the four there shown on press row.

So another issue is war tops. Where did Matt get this new awesome look to the site? He calls it a “war top.” I’m sure that’s for a reason but it looks a lot like something else he might know about. Oh wait.

Looks like ESPN and is just as cool as a local site. I love the look on the SienaSaintsBlog site when he keeps running these. Matt says the site does better with these war tops, and people appear to like them on the site too. Did I mention they look awesome and make the site look really cool? Plus with the new video, how can you not turn to the page?

Weekly RushTheCourt piece on the CAA came out Monday. What to look forward to this week?

Wed 1/20

William & Mary @ VCU

VCU is coming on strong in conference so far, winning three straight by double digits, and should challenge the Tribe. For William & Mary this will be a trial by fire to see if they are deserving of being one of the top four in the CAA.

Sat 1/23

VCU @ Northeastern

There will be TV for Comcast viewers and a few others, so do not miss this afternoon matchup. There’s a chance Northeastern will be going for an 11-game win streak to tie their 1987 record.

Old Dominion @ William & Mary

A tough week ends at home where the Tribe get the Monarchs in a huge matchup. Entering the week, the Tribe rank 9^th in offensive efficiency, the Monarchs rank 10^th in defensive efficiency.

In my weekly RotoSavants piece, I say I’m not a fan of David Ortiz. Some of the staff might disagree but I think Ortiz is definately on a downhill slope and the real sleeper if he doesn’t perform I think is playing time. The Red Sox have built a quality bench, with the potential of a frustrated Mike Lowell on it, the Red Sox could platoon Ortiz soon.

SienaSaintsBlog did a ton of video and stories at Fairfield on Saturday and will continue to do so. We got a bunch of cool videos and will be sharing them at http://youtube.com/sienasaintsblogvideo. We also met a nice guy from the College Hoops Journal who sat next to us and was doing a story on Siena. His story is here and he used, with permission of course, two of Matt’s photos from Saturday.

Siena Saints Blog now has a YouTube channel and it includes press conferences, highlights and more.

We shot a ton of video on Saturday. Matt said I got lucky when I rolled out this one.

We also got Clarence Jackson, who led the Saints with 22 points, to talk to us.

I think the flip cam does very well, even grabbing sound I think it does very well.