Less than 48 hours after topping Albany, SU will go to battle with the Colonials of Robert Morris. Hailing from the Northeastern Conference, RMU clinched an NCAA tournament bid last season by winning their conference tournament and promptly lost to Michigan State by 15 in the opening round.

Both the Orange and Colonials are recovering from losing their best players from 2008-09 but each also has a crew of tested players on which to shoulder the brunt of those losses. For Robert Morris, they look to rebound from the graduations of 2008-09 NEC Player of the Year Jeremy Chappell and NEC Defensive Player of the Year Bateko Francisco. Then again, RMU lost the 2007-08 NEC POY and ended up being just fine thanks to the contributions of Rob Robinson, the team’s leading scorer (11.2 PPG) and rebounder (5.6 RPG), so maybe there’s just something in the water in Pittsburgh.

Robert Morris may be the crown jewel of the NEC (whatever that’s worth), but recall that an incredibly shallow SU team beat RMU just two years ago in the NIT. The Colonials still have many players from that team still around, so it will be a reunion of sorts.

If SU learned anything from last season, it’s that those midmajors can be scrappy.  The Orange should be even more aware of such a midmajor fresh off a tourney berth and 50 wins in its last two seasons, but based on what we saw Monday night, they shouldn’t have that hard a time against a physically overmatched team.

With SU having such a clear size advantage in the back of the zone, I’m going to shift my focus to the backups – primarily Kris Joseph and to a lesser degree, DaShonte Riley. Joseph performed very well in 27 minutes off the bench, showing off good range and collecting five rebounds. With Onuaku’s health still a question mark, if Joseph can step in, it’ll be even harder to sleep on the SU bigs. Some fans have already started comparing to Kris Joseph with Rick Jackson as someone who made the sophomore leap, and I can definitely see the similarities, aside from the involvement of a transition into a starting role (though Joseph ended up playing starter’s minutes).

Riley, in garbage time, showed that he can be serviceable at the very least this season. Despite hitting a very nice turnaround jumper and causing problems with his wingspan, there’s just too many deserving players in front of him on the depth chart for him to get meaningful minutes without someone going down with an injury or major foul trouble.

Since the backcourts don’t have that major size disparity, we can expect a slightly more accurate barometer of true talent than with the bigs. After injuring his ankle early in the second half against Albany, Andy Rautins sat out the remainder of the game and was seen wearing a boot later on. According to Mike Waters, Rautins sat out Tuesday’s practice to treat the bad ankle and his status for Wednesday is up in the air. Don’t be surprised if Scoop Jardine starts at the two spot, which I don’t particularly mind, considering his contributions to the victory on Monday. Scoop looked great on defense and was also efficient offensively. Of course, if Andy can’t go, the situation puts Mookie Jones one seat closer to the scorer’s table, so we should also see him get a chance to bounce back from his rough outing, provided the game doesn’t stay close for long.

Bottom line, the Orange simply need to take care of business. Robert Morris may be a tournament team, but it would still take a great deal of carelessness by SU for them to crumble Wednesday night.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 8:00 am by Brian G. . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.