Under the Radar Game of the Day: NJIT at North Florida, 7:00 PM Eastern, espn3
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Tonight is one of those nights when selecting the UTR Game of the Day was not easy, with key matchups in several conferences on the slate. However, when our adopted “Team of the People” from last season here at HOOPS HD, the NJIT Highlanders, are scheduled to play arguably the most important regular season game in school history, the choice ended up being an obvious one. Tonight in Jacksonville, Florida, NJIT will be taking their shot at moving towards the Atlantic Sun regular season championship and the #1 seed in the upcoming conference tournament.
NJIT enters play tonight with a record of 7-4 in conference play and 16-11 overall. They are currently sitting in a three-way tie for first place with North Florida and Jacksonville. After we had spent the non-conference portion of the season discussing how we believed this league would be a battle between NJIT and UNF this season, the Highlanders got out to a rough 2-4 start to league play, including home losses to South Carolina Upstate, Lipscomb and North Florida. Things have been a lot different since the end of January though as Damon Lyn, Tim Coleman, Ky Howard and company have won five straight games, including a solid win this past weekend at home over Florida Gulf Coast, to move into a first place tie. The Highlanders play at UNF tonight and at Jacksonville on Saturday. If they can find a way to sweep these two tough road contests, then only a game next week at Upstate will stand between them and the outright regular season title.
North Florida’s story this season has been almost the exact opposite of NJIT’s. The Ospreys started out Atlantic Sun play looking like the dominant team in the league, winning their first 7 games and doing so by fairly comfortable score margins. Then came February 1. In what we thought at the time was just one of the crazy inexplicable losses that teams sometimes suffer, the Ospreys fell at home to Stetson. The only problem was they have yet to recover from that loss, dropping their next three since then and not even looking good in any of those losses. UNF now sits at 7-4 in conference play and 18-10 overall. The only good news is that they certainly have time to right the ship, with NJIT coming in tonight and a game at Jacksonville next week to end the regular season. However, if they continue to play the same way they have played these past four games, Dallas Moore, Beau Beech, Chris Davenport and their teammates may not even end up with a quarterfinal-round home game in the conference tournament.