Monday, February 27, 2017

Northeast Conference tournament preview

This is part 4 of a 32-part series previewing every conference tournament in the country.  We'll detail what you need to keep track of in each tournament and the various stakes for each team.

Final standings:
Mount St Mary's 14-4
Long Island 13-5
Wagner 11-7
St Francis (PA) 11-7
Bryant 9-9
Fairleigh Dickinson 9-9
Robert Morris 9-9
Sacred Heart 8-10
Central Connecticut 4-14
St Francis (NY) 2-16

Tournament format:
First, only the top 8 get to play in this one, which works out well in this case since there's 2 clear teams at the bottom that get cut off.

Higher seed hosts each game.  Quarterfinals Wednesday March 1, semis Saturday March 4, finals Tuesday March 7.  They reseed in the semifinals, by the way.

The matchups:
8) Sacred Heart at 1) Mount St Mary's
5) Bryant at 4) St Francis (PA)
6) Fairleigh Dickinson at 3) Wagner
7) Robert Morris at 2) Long Island

The stakes:
Conference is RPI 30.  Everyone but Mount St Mary's is sub-200 in the RPI.  If Mount St Mary's gets lucky, they can avoid Dayton if other terrible teams win their way into the field.  Otherwise, the winner of this conference is headed to Dayton.  There's really not much to talk about here.  The entire conference was sorta kinda not good at all.

Mount St Mary's obviously has the NIT bid...Long Island is 20-11 overall, so maybe they sneak into the CIT.  Wagner is also over .500 overall.  But frankly it's not like this conference deserves anything postseason-wise.  So just enjoy this tournament in its most basic terms, whoever wins this will be irrelevant.

1 comment:

HenryMuto said...

I care just about every conference tournament as I have a team I prefer to see win that I think could at least compete in the NCAA tournament...this league is not one of them. These teams all stink.