RushTheCourt and CollegeHoopsJournal highlight my coaching candidates piece for St. John’s and Seton Hall.

So I’ve probably done more basketball watching this year than I’ve ever done in a while. Yet when it came time to do brackets, I didn’t feel like putting my bracket in any money pool. Weird right?

Well my round one was ok.

Some of my picks I made because of the writers I liked. I liked the writer who covered the Missouri Tigers who I e-mailed back and forth when he voted Siena in his top 25, so I picked them over Clemson and won.

As of the first round I only have one perfect region, that is the West Region where my Murray State upset held on and BYU managed to win in 2-overtimes.

I made 23 of 32 picks in the first round. That’s alright… so far. More next week when I have picks after round two.

Over at Rush The Court I put in my CAA Tournament preview. It was when writing this article I found out that it is National Procrastination Week and I finished this just around 10pm Wednesday night.

Some quick quotes from the article:

[One seed Old Dominion] will have a lot tougher path to the championship than ever because of a potential re-match with Virginia Commonwealth. The Monarchs escaped last Saturday with a three-point win at home and were beaten by VCU by 12 on the road earlier in February. There’s a chance the Monarchs’ semifinal game will be their toughest yet.

While this tournament has been bound to have upsets in the past, I’m not sure that VCU over George Mason would be a huge upset this weekend. Couple that with the top six teams really are close to equals, Drexel can make a run. Oh and Hofstra has quietly won nine of their last ten entering the tournament.

I did a bunch of writing over the weekend at SienaSaintsBlog.com as well as a BracketBuster recap on RushTheCourt.net.

Ryan Restivo is the RTC correspondent for the CAA and an occasional contributor.

That’s the line I like. I also have a piece on RotoSavants for today which is now part of the YardBarker network! Troy Patterson, who doesn’t need my personal compliments, does a great job running the site as it will start to see the steady increase of pre-draft day hits and he writes as great stuff at The Hardball Times too.

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 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.