>I think Ohio St will be pretty competitive next season, so that will be<BR>
>a good game.  You probably should have mentioned them the first time.

It slipped my mind. I had to go to a news article that had the list of
potential opponents (and definate ones) to verify all of them. I'm sure there
are other games that would qualify as patsy-types, but everyone has some of
those games. On a neutral court, OSU should be a great game.

>That's a tougher game than Xavier at home.  I don't think Providence<BR>
>and Ball St will not be good enough to threaten Bama at Bama.  That is<BR>
>if the Tide are still going to be good next year.<BR>

Well, the Ball St game is actually in Mobile, and Providence may be in
Birmingham, but both games will have heavy home-court crowds for the Tide.

With four out of five starters returning, and a strong recruiting class, most of
the folks familiar with the program don't consider the 2002-03 Alabama team to
have the potential to be good. They consider them to have the potential to be
great. Of course, potential is meaningless if you can't produce in March. I
actually think that Bama is better off with Rod Grizzard having left for the
pros, since he was so inconsistent last year.


>So now you're talking about three iffy games (and I'm not so sure about<BR>
>Utah next year) and eight or nine gimmes (depending on how many games<BR>
>they play).<BR>

That's the problem - you never really know how a team is going to turn out at
the end of the year when you look at them in May. Injuries could plague them,
or a recruit could fail to qualify, or turn out to be a dud, or a good player
could have a bad year. Travis Stinnett was having a very good year in '00-01,
but he was hardly ever seen in '01-02, and probably won't even be on scholarship
this year.

What makes a good schedule, though? One that will give you a high RPI at the
appropriate time, according to some people. But you don't know how anybody else
is going to do until the season is well underway. How many people thought
Maryland would have a decent team a year ago, let alone win the national
championship?