Fear The Turtle or Hell In A Shell?

Bear with me. Like I said before, I plan on using this blog for a variety of purposes and to address a variety of topics. Some you may find intriguing, some you may find totally useless, some you may find humorous, some totally humor free. My blog is your oyster.

That aside, it's time to talk some college roundball. You'll learn quickly that I'm a huge college basketball fan. Namely, Maryland Terps basketball fan.



We're now officially two months into the season and Maryland's racked up a quite respectable 14-2 start. They're ranked just on the outer fringes of the AP and Coaches Top 25 polls. They've achieved key victories over Illinois, Michigan State, St. John's, and a vastly under-rated Winthrop team. Yet, I still can't quite tell you how good this team is. 16 games. Just more than half a season and I still can't figure out if I'm rooting for a winner, or the same enigmatic, low energy, turnover prone product of the past two seasons.

Last night the Terps beat Siena 88-57. A drubbing. That tells me nothing. Well other than the fact that Gary intentionally made this cup-cake laden schedule to hand his team some sorely needed freebies in the victory department. And I will admit, while watching the Terps beat schools like UMKC 101-50 isn't the most exciting display of college athletics I've seen in a while, it's certainly effective.

Gary saw last year, that more or less in this ACC, 20 is the magic number. You get to 20 wins, you play .500 ball in conference, you're assured a spot dancing with the other hopefuls come March. Obviously, he thought this team needed a couple more freebies to get to 20. As it stands now I think they're gonna finish in the neighborhood of 23-8 or 24-7, and look at a #4 or #5 seed squarely in the eye. But then again, I'm the guy who just told you I don't know how good this team is. I do know that they'll win more games than last year, and I feel pretty confident that alone will be enough to get them into the tourney. With ACC play starting up soon, I do know that I'll know a whole lot more, real soon.

And that's good enough for me.

Next game: Miami @ Maryland 1/10/2006 9:00pm tip-off
From what I understand of Miami, they lost two exceptional players last year in Diaz and Hite, and haven't come remotely close to replacing them. They've got losses to Binghamton, Kent State and Northwestern. I'm liking our chances.