High Point

Our game prediction guru Greg Mengelt has been on fire this year. He'll be picking almost conference tournament game over the next 2 weeks.

 

#12 Georgetown had three players finish in double figures while also frustrating #19 Notre Dame on the other end of the floor in a 59-41 win at the Verizon Center.

The current era of college sports means that fans have become used to conference foes meeting for the first time in a season in late February, as is the case with #18 Notre Dame (20-9, 12-4) visiting #8 Georgetown (21-6, 11-5) on Monday night. Both teams lost games in the tri-state area over the last five days with the Hoyas getting blown out at Seton Hall and Notre Dame losing at St. John's on Saturday, but these are still teams that can make noise in New York next week.

In the first meeting between #18 Notre Dame and West Virginia the Fighting Irish didn't get going until late, when three three-pointers pushed them past the Mountaineers in Morgantown. Mike Brey's team got going offensively much sooner in the rematch, as a two-point lead at the half turned into a 71-44 whipping, moving their win streak to nine. This marks the first time in school history that the Irish have won nine straight Big East games, and by the game this young team has the look of a group that can make some noise next month. 

After going over the teams expected to win their regular season titles, we move on to talking about the top freshmen in each conference. Will all automatically take over and become the stars of their respective teams and leagues? It's tough to say at this point in the season, but that doesn't mean that we can't discuss it. Below are the picks for each of the 32 conferences.

America East: James Kennedy (Boston University)

In the latest installment in his "Coaching Greats" interview series CHN Jon Teitel spent some time with former High Point head coach Bart Lundy, who won 96 games in six seasons at the school. In his first season at High Point Coach Lundy and his staff led the team to the Big South Tournament title game, where they lost to Liberty. Lundy is now the Director of Basketball Operations at Marquette. 

Jon Teitel: You attended five different high schools while growing up in North Carolina. How on earth did that happen, and was it hard to keep moving around each year?  

This point in the season offers many at-large candidates the opportunity to boost their resumes with another big win before going into conference tournament play. But having the chance and taking advantage of it are two entirely different things, and this was on full display Tuesday night. Baylor went on the road to Oklahoma State with a chance to simply show that they were effective at staying out of their own way...didn't happen.

This is the first in a series of conference tournament previews I’ll be doing for CollegeHoops.net, in which I run down all the teams involved, giving a breif statistical review and picking out some of the key players, and presenting the log5 projections, using in-conference offensive and defensive efficiency.The basic log5 methodology comes from Bill James, and this is an area Ken Pomeroy has looke

#8 High Point Panthers (9-20, 4-14 Big South) at #1 Radford (18-11, 15-3 Big South), 7:00pm ? Live Video: Big South EDGE on www.BigSouthSports.com