I Bleed Blue and White

Brian, Mark and I will make our predictions in the coming weeks, but right now I’m going to give my thoughts on the recently released schedule for the upcoming season. For right now I’m going to focus on the Big East portion.Maybe it’s just the nature of the conference, but this is a very tough alignment of games for us. Plus, we’re playing Pittsburgh and Syracuse on the road with no return date. Very unlucky.

The 5 Wachovia games are as follows -

1. Sunday January 17th vs. Georgetown
2. Wednesday January 27th vs. Notre Dame
3. Saturday February 13th vs. Providence
4. Monday February 15th vs. UConn
5. Saturday March 6th vs. West Virginia

I’m going to break the schedule down into stretches and discuss each one. No predictions yet, just over-confidence or worries.

Tough from the get-go (at Marquette, vs. DePaul, vs. Marquette, at Louisville, vs. Georgetown)

We’ll probably be favored in all of those games except Louisville, but I really, really don’t like this. By the time the Big East starts we’ll have give-or-take 13 games under our belt, including a tough neutral (really, away) game vs. Maryland and a trip to Puerto Rico against solid competition.

Marquette is rebuilding, and they will be young but that’s a tough place to open up. I think we’ll handle DePaul and Marquette at home, but then we have to go to Freedom Hall and face a Louisville team that has had our number. Not excited about that at all. Thankfully we get 5 days off before returning home to face Georgetown, and we’ll have the revenge factor from last year. Not a great way to start off the campaign though. Thankfully we’ll have Reggie Redding back by the time this kicks off.

A little reprieve (at Rutgers, at St. John’s, vs. Notre Dame, vs. Seton Hall)

I would be very upset, and mildly surprised, if we didn’t go undefeated here. None of these teams should be in the upper-echelon. The one game that worries me is Seton Hall. They’ll be better than most will expect this year and they’ll want revenge for the OT-thriller we stole away from them last year.

The make-or-break month

Yes, from the time we go to Georgetown on February 6th to the time the conference season ends one month later (home against West Virginia) we’ll probably know exactly what our NCAA aspirations should be. There are only a couple games in there that can even be considered “breaks” (vs. Providence, vs. South Florida, at Cincinnati) and even those aren’t exactly gimmes.

Plus, this stretch has some awful road games (at Georgetown, at West Virginia, at Pittsburgh) and some mega-huge home games (UConn, West Virginia). Yep, the month of February is will make or break our season.

…I want to hear your thoughts on all of this…fire away in the comments section…