2008 Pre-season rank?

[MADXSTER]

DWest -

that Duncan, Lavender, and Stan are comparable losses to Cage, Doellman, and Cole. .

Those are some great names there, aren't they!

[xu9697]

Next year's frontline has the chance (on paper) to be one of, if not the, best in XU history. CJ, Brown and Love, with Frease, McLean and possibly Bronson coming off the bench.

I expect to see the most improvement from Jackson and Brown. Next year's team very well might only have 3 guys scoring in double figures, and rely more on CJ and Brown. That could be a good thing.

The biggest concern, obviously, is guard play. Great guards typically beat great bigs in college basketball (see Stanford vs. Texas). I don't know enough about the freshman PGs we are bringing in, but I'm hopeful that a coach like Miller is bringing in the right kind of players and can "coach them up" quickly. He does have a little PG experience.

[Mr. Neutral]

I was going to try to do a player-by-player list of things they might try to address during the offseason, but then I realized that the same issue kept coming up with most of our returning players.

As a team, we had almost no one who could stop on a dime and put up (and make) an accurate jumper. Our perimeter players (and that includes Anderson, Raymond, Jackson, Graves, and even Brown) have to work on beating their man off the dribble and getting off (and making) a reasonably uncontested 15-footer.

One way or another, we're going to have to figure out how to get off good shots against taller, more athletic players and not end up throwing up the prayers that we did all too often on Saturday.

We have a lot of talent coming back, no question, but Saturday showed the difference between "good" and "GOOD". We need to take that next step.

[RONALD78]

Pre season ranking means nothing......the so called experts are usually wrong on half the teams in the top 25 of basketball or football......what i do care about is the mid season and final polls which are based on performance on the field or court. Based on the end of the season, I expect X to be ranked somewhere within the top 25 or within the top 35. And that would be fine because it may/would get X into the NCAAs in order to make a run at the FF.