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Louisiana-Lafayette at Georgia Southern, 7:30 PM Eastern, No TV
Looking at this evening’s schedule, the UTR Game of the Day pick at first seemed obvious. Arguably the two best teams in the OVC are playing each other at 9:00 PM on ESPNU as Belmont travels to Murray State. However, looking closer at the standings, both of those teams are only in second place in their respective divisions. The two division leaders, Eastern Kentucky and Eastern Illinois, are also playing tonight (7:30 PM Eastern, live streaming at ovcsports.com). However, instead of either of those games, we have chosen to send our UTR crew to Statesboro, Georgia, to take a look at an UTR team that even the UTR guys have ignored so far this year — the Georgia Southern Eagles.
The 11 team Sun Belt Conference runs a full double round-robin schedule, meaning that each teams gets a home-and-home with every other team in the conference. While this is, in our opinion, the best way to produce a true regular season champion, it does have a significant disadvantage for a league with more than 10 teams in it. The SBC conference season is 20 games long, resulting in two fewer chances for a non-conference game. Georgia Southern made matters even worse this year by scheduling three of their nine non-conference games against non-D1 competition. In other words, prior to conference play, we only had six games to evaluate the Eagles with. They went 4-2 in those games, with close losses at Illinois and at UCF, and the best win coming at South Florida. The Eagles at currently 10-3 overall after sweeping their non-D1 games and starting 3-1 in league play, the loss coming by one point at Texas-Arlington. The start is good enough to have Georgia Southern sitting at second place in the conference and to hold a 130 RPI, second best in the league. It is also good enough to have them on our radar.
Tonight, Georgia Southern welcomes in the best team so far in conference play, and we are not talking about Georgia State. With the preseason favorites appearing to be imploding in early Sun Belt play, the defending conference tournament champions from Louisiana-Lafayette are 4-0 and in first place (10-5 overall). The Ragin’ Cajuns are coming off of a home win over Georgia State and also have a home win over one of the top teams in Conference USA, Louisiana Tech, to their credit. If they can pick up the road victory in Statesboro tonight, Louisiana-Lafayette will have asserted itself as the early favorite to take the regular season crown, something we did not think possible about a month and a half ago when Georgia State was blowing out Green Bay and taking Old Dominion to overtime on the road. With the conference tournament being held practically in Lafayette’s backyard in New Orleans, and the top two teams in the Sun Belt tournament receiving byes into the semifinals, the Ragin’ Cajuns appear to be well on their way to setting themselves up for another shot at the NCAA tournament.