Another 8 Man Team

The UNCW Seahawks took a setback on Saturday night as they were not able to close out the crucial matchup in Fairfax. After trailing most of the game. The Patriots of GMU were able to shut down UNCW late in the game to come away with a victory. TJ Carter led all scorers with 21 points. Mitch Laue tallied a double-double for the Hawks with 10 points and boards. Jai Lewis led the way for GMU with 19 points. (Even though a lot of those were handed to him by the officials, because apparently the opposing player is not allowed to impede his progress to the basket. Completely unacceptable. If you put a hand in his face you are getting a foul.) And on that same topic how does Isiah Hunter get a Technical foul late in ODU's loss to Richmond for flapping his jaw, and Jai Lewis does not. He seemed to be having very in depth discussions with Todd Hendley after every shot he made, with an assist from the ref, and I don't think he was complementing Todd on his haircut. The officiating seemed completely one sided to me, even though every Mason fan will say the same thing, just that it was one sided towards us. But enough of making excuses, when you come right down to it we still could have won the game. The victory came down to the team that executed at the end, GMU, and the team that loss was the one that panicked and settled for bad shots, UNCW. However, I really don't believe GMU would have been close at the end if it wasn't for the one sided officiating. I mean look at the boxscore, Mason scored 69 points, they shot 28 FT's. And very few of those came within the last minute when we were trying to send them to the line. On the other hand UNCW shot 75% at the line. The problem is we only shot 8.

In other CAA news JMU finally picked up their first conference victory last night against Delaware. So congrats to them.

With their win Saturday, GMU is now in first by themselves at 11-2. They are followed by UNCW at 10-3. Hofstra is a half game back in 3rd at 9-3. Here are the complete CAA standings.

In the latest RPI Rankings several teams remain in the top 100:

32 GMU
43 UNCW
47 ODU
59 Hofstra
64 VCU
96 Northeastern

In the latest national rankings GMU and Hofstra are receiving votes. GMU is as high as 33 in the Coaches Poll and Hofstra received votes in the AP poll putting them at 45th with Stanford and UW Milwaukee.

In the latest Mid Major Top 25 poll several teams remain up in the top 15:

6 GMU
10 Hofstra
12 UNCW
13 ODU
24 VCU
30 Northeastern

The Seahawks take on Delaware on Thursday at 7:00 in Trask. The game will be broadcast as always on 980 AM. Here is a link to the live stats.

PS. More about this later but the reigning CAA Regular season baseball champs, UNCW, start off their season on Friday with a 3 day weekend series against MD Eastern Shore. They play at 3 on Friday and at 2 on Saturday and Sunday. So come out to Brooks Field this weekend, after coming out to Trask on Thursday to watch the action.