Our First real opponent, BRADLEY, is a good one!

[Mars]

Out of 330 teams last year, Bradley (our Div. I opener, from the Missouri Valley Conference) had an RPI of 98. Not bad. Much better than Wyoming, TCU, CSU, and Air Force, of course. Their best win last season was over Illinois State (RPI of 46).

BYU's total post-season wins under Dave Rose: 0
Bradley's post-season wins last year: 3
Bradley's post-season wins the year before: 4
Bradley's post-season wins the year before that: 1
Bradley's post-season wins the year before that one: 2, including a win over 4-Seed Kansas

There's a MWC-MVC Conference Challenge this year, and next, if you remember. All 9 of our teams play one of their 10 in made-for-TV/made-for-RPI events. BYU will play a top MVC team (like Creighton or Wichita State) on the road next season. MVC teams are well known for going deep in recent NCAA Tourneys. Also, their overall conference strength and ours have been almost the exact same for years in a row now.

Friday November 13th, 9:30PM.
Be there.

[hawkwing]

Mars, I admit I don't get into basketball as much as football, and I never really know much about BYU's team until we've played several games.

How do you expect us to do against Bradley? Where are our strengths compared to theirs? Where are our weakness compared to theirs?

What will the final score be?

[Sammich]

I'm already excited about basketball season and I'm glad to see it's going to be exciting from the start. I usually don't get excited until football season is over. Or until we lose one of the last few games of the season (hopefully doesn't happen this year, because part of my coping mechanism is gearing up for basketball and since that has already happened, I might fall into a depression otherwise).

[Mars]

My prediction:

BYU 73
Bradley 69

[Schmoe]

Shoot, I may need to go and tweak my predictions a little (or perhaps that's Mars's plan because he knows more than I do about college basketball, which is not hard to do because I don't follow it at all until football season ends, hmm.... ).

[beauso79]

My prediction:

BYU - 77
Bradley - 61

[snoscythe]

The other thing to keep in mind is this is one of Bradley's only chances to notch a signature win for their tournament resume. Their only other OOC games against teams you might have heard of are Ok St and Iowa St.

Bradley will give everything they've got.

[Qman]

Based on what I have learned about Bradley-

http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/basketball ... eam_report

Basically they are a mirror image of BYU. Their best players are guards and small forwards. They like to shoot the 3 and their bigs are kind of journeymen or freshmen. JT should have a favorable matchup and Emery, Abouo and Fredette are going to have their hands full defensively.

[EM_Puma]

Gee, I hadn't worried too much about this opponent even though I was familiar with the school's name, meaing they have had to be a bit successful in the past few years. Now, I'm a bit more worrried. I think we have the horses to carry us through and we should win, but I wasn't expecting a mid-level to upper level MWC opponent first out of the gate.

I'm hoping we'll be rocking and rolling with a big crowd tonight with their $1/ticket offer. We're taking our 12-13 year old Scouts (where we were going to go camping tonight is supposed to be having icy roads, so we've cancelled that event) tonight, so we should be about 16 strong in the upper benches.

[Mars]

Gee, I hadn't worried too much about this opponent even though I was familiar with the school's name, meaing they have had to be a bit successful in the past few years. Now, I'm a bit more worrried. I think we have the horses to carry us through and we should win, but I wasn't expecting a mid-level to upper level MWC opponent first out of the gate.

Coach Rose says that this is the toughest home opener of his coaching career.

Of course, he also lost his first home opener as a new head coach at BYU.