Despite late-season losses to Louisville Georgetown and big pushes by West Virginia and Ohio State to propel themselves to top seed status, Syracuse has that claim for the first time in 30 years. The selection committee oddly ranked ‘Cuse below Duke among the top seeds, possibly due to a combination of uncertainty regarding Arinze Onuaku’s health and the fact that the Blue Devils won their conference tournament.

If you go by road record (8-1 for SU, 5-5 for Duke) and pitting the deep Big East against the ACC having the off year it had, putting Duke over SU is definitely a head-scratcher, but we’re not talking about a screwjob of epic proportions. Digging a little deeper, the Orange may actually be in a favorable situation.

The impact of that ranking is that should each team advance to the Sweet Sixteen, Syracuse gets shipped all the way out to Salt Lake City, while Duke has a shorter trip from home to Houston. For what it’s worth, there are three Big East teams in Duke’s region (Notre Dame, Villanova and Louisville) compared to solely Pitt and SU in the West. More to that end, there are seven power conference teams in SU’s region against eight in Duke’s. Not to say that the mid-majors in the West region won’t make some noise, but I’m not convinced SU was slighted in the end, unless there’s a massive SU alumni colony in Houston that I don’t know about.

In other SU news, the chances of AO suiting up for the weekend are about on par with my chances of bringing Bar Refaeli home with me. Since SU lost to Georgetown on Thursday, Onuaku hasn’t been allowed to jog, let alone run or jump on the achy leg. It goes without saying, then, that he hasn’t practiced.

The likely adjustments to the starting lineup would involve Kris Joseph starting, bumping Rick Jackson to center and Wesley Johnson to the 4. Joseph would take the three spot normally held by Johnson, and Andy Rautins and Brandon Triche would man the guard spots as they have all season. There isn’t a lot of dropoff in production when you consider how well Joseph has played this year, but the impact is truly felt when you consider that Boeheim has only used a seven-man rotation and that Dashonte Riley is inexperienced. I think Riley can fill in capably off the bench against a first-round opponent, but as the competition gets better, the margin for error, specifically the ability to withstand foul trouble, will play a much larger role.

A preview of Friday night’s game against Vermont will come later this week.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 15th, 2010 at 12:02 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.