brooklyn brownstone said:

Well if we can manage a gaudy record by mid Feb those Saint Joe’s,VCU, Dayton games will give the team the chance to prove it is legit. Before an inevitable GooMoos collapse game bc we cut down nets at UD arena

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You know, at the time the net cut didn't get me too stirred up but looking back on it and especially knowing now how the season would play out kind of pisses me off

Gilly has signed an Exhibit 10 deal with the Cavs and will be at their training camp.

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GKiller said:

#13 is my favorite number so I'd tell him to stick with that myself.

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I did always think of you as Spidernation's good luck charm.

VegasSpider said:

Who the hell is #22? No one on roster with that number..... that looks like Goose?

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Jack Graham. 99% sure. Although Goose was practicing with our team last year when finishing up grad school.

Maybe he switched numbers idk. #13 is my favorite number so I'd tell him to stick with that myself.

SFspidur said:

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Who the hell is #22? No one on roster with that number..... that looks like Goose?

MDspider8 said:

I think the national perception around us is going to be lower than we'd think, mostly because we lost our four best players from last year. Very few, if any media outlets are predicting us to finish in the top-six of the A10, and I'm expecting that we'll be picked somewhere between 7-9 in the preseason poll.

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Still, I think we should be given the benefit of the doubt. The new college landscape comes with a lot of turnover in terms of players leaving/entering, which doesn't mean we won't be good. In fact, we showed last year that we can have immediate success with impactful transfers year 1.

You want tv games? Be high up in preseason rankings of your league. Have expectations to be that good year after year and put that out publicly to the world.

spiderstudent17 said:

Ridiculous that we didn't get any Friday night games after finishing 1st in the regular season last year

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Agreed - even shocked that one of the VCU games didn't get ESPN treatment. One of those games has always been on ESPN2 or ESPNU.

I have two mindsets with this.

First, if teams do get poached by the Big East, I think the A10 is certainly in a stable place with 12-14 teams. With UMass leaving and Temple and Charlotte who left many years ago, every school in the A10 will be basketball centric and not have football heavily influencing decisions. As far as basketball centric conferences go, the A10 is the 2nd best option in the country besides Big East and the Big East won't poach too many teams from the A10 so even if a few leave, for everyone else that remains this is the best option as far as conferences go.

Secondly and more importantly is that I want us to have the mindset that we belong in the Big East and should have a goal to be one of those teams that gets poached. I am not saying that right now our resume is eye-popping and that we are a must-have for them. However, we are a great, small, private academically elite school in similar geographic footprint with the conference. We fit the identity of what the Big East seeks in schools. In terms of basketball pedigree, we definitely need to improve our success in that regard, but we are a solid program that invests a lot in basketball and has good results. We need to take the next step and get towards Dayton/VCU level of success. Remember, we were considered in 2013 originally. I am well aware that there is still a ways to go for this. Regardless of whether we should be in the Big East now or not, I believe that having the mindset to strive towards being one of those teams that moves up to the Big East is something I hope we aspire to. I agree with some posts above, that we shouldn't just wait around and hope things work out. Let's be the creators of our destiny.

As for the schedule, agreed that it looks to be a cushy start (GW, @UMass, Rhody, @Bona in the first 5 games is pretty nice). That final 4 game stretch is brutal though and it's very possible that we won't be favored to win any of those games come February. Really, the entirety of February should be really chalemging outside of the Fordham and La Salle back to back.

Well if we can manage a gaudy record by mid Feb those Saint Joe’s,VCU, Dayton games will give the team the chance to prove it is legit. Before an inevitable GooMoos collapse game bc we cut down nets at UD arena

spiderstudent17 said:

Ridiculous that we didn't get any Friday night games after finishing 1st in the regular season last year

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I think the national perception around us is going to be lower than we'd think, mostly because we lost our four best players from last year. Very few, if any media outlets are predicting us to finish in the top-six of the A10, and I'm expecting that we'll be picked somewhere between 7-9 in the preseason poll.

Ridiculous that we didn't get any Friday night games after finishing 1st in the regular season last year

Here is our schedule. We open New Years Eve at home with GW. Did not get any of the 11 national espn games on Friday nights.

On paper the A10 schedule is easier to start potentially allowing us to build momentum, especially if we perform with the bad OOC. It is a hard finish.

Stork3 said:

And the tropical storm should be right there on Saturday afternoon.

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Great!

32counter said:

I agree that their 1-3 record is extremely misleading given their difficult OOC.I think we in for a very difficult game.

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And the tropical storm should be right there on Saturday afternoon.

Don't forget as well - NCAA Is allowing exhibitions for charity this year. So maybe this leads to less scheduling of D2 and D3 schools. Example - Arkansas and coach Cal are playing Kansas as an exhibition on October 25th.

I see this potentially being used by P5 schools as a way to play each other, get a good game, but if they lose - it doesn't count. It gives them a good barometer of what they need to work on instead of playing cupcakes, but no down side if they lose.

Just to highlight how wacky this exhibition game stuff is...

The D-I rules have a floating date for the first allowed game, which is the first Tuesday before the second Friday of November, unless that date is Election Day in which case you can play on Monday. So for this year, it's 11/4. Exhibition games exempted from your max game limit must take place prior this date.

The D-III rules have a fixed date for the first allowed regular-season game, which is November 8, with only exhibitions/scrimmages allowed before that.

Mount Olive is playing UNCW on 11/4 and us on 11/6, which means they are required to be regular-season games for us and UNCW but exhibition games for Mount Olive.

The way the calendar lines up next year, D-I will have 11/11 as the first permissible regular season game date, after the D-III start date, so the way these games have to be counted or scheduled changes.

Again, we can't play 3 games in a 5-team MTE. It either needs to drop to 2 games or they need to get it to an even number of teams for the math to work.

If the Mount Olive game were to be made exhibition, we would have to move the date. Those games have to occur before the first allowable regular season date (11/4).

If there will be only 5 teams in the MTE, we should play 3 games in the "tourney", also play the one team we don't play at some point, and call the D3 game an exhibition.

GKiller said:

I'm all for a little Twitter engagement with other accounts and Richmond bball isn't bad at that. But this one is a little ironic. Hello McFly...McFly anybody home? All the teams in the Gulf Coast haven't been announced yet nor our first opponent.

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All the teams in the Gulf Coast have indeed been announced, and that's the problem.

what exactly can the A10 do? we're in the right league. if the BE poaches Dayton and Slu, we adjust.