End of season record....

[Harrison]

The topic below made some good points.  But a couple of things have been over looked.
1.  Crean has discussed on a number of occassions scaling back practice.  Arguably a issue early on but not recently.
2.   Schedules are stacked...even in C-USA the best teams played each other down the stretch.  Even moreso with TV in the BE.  We play Pitt on the last game of the season because the powers that be in NY saw it as a protential BE regular season title game.  Same reason Pitt plays Georgetown at the end.  Therefore, the schedule gets harder.
3.  The most important factor of all... you are almost guaranteed 2 losses!!  Unless you hang banners.  Now MU went undefeated in January, but we did not play in two single elimination tourneys during that time either.  So those two loses that you will pick up unless you are the champ will always bring down the averages.

Items #2 and #3 are products of success.  Our program could really suck and then we would not have to lament the difficult schedules of Feb. and March. ND and rutgers finishing schedules are relatively easy.  Nor would we have to worry about picking up a loss at those two end of the season tourneys.  We could be like Depaul or South Florida, they were both undefeated at the BE and NCAA tourneys last year.

[WashDCWarrior]

Very well explained.

[Tulsa Warrior]

The only good news in the remainer of the schedule -- very little travel -- Chicago and South Bend.  The Chicago game may have more of a feel of a home game because of the strong Marquette fan turnout   Another factor in the Chicago game will be McNeal playing in his home town.

FYI, I'd rather have Georgetown behind us in the regular season than in front of us.  The way the Hoyas are playing they could take the national title.

[CTWarrior]

All of this is interesting, but I'll feel a lot better about things if we win our games this week.  I think we need to win 5 more games counting the BE tournament to get a top 4 seed in the NCAAs. 

4-1 regular season and 1-1 Big East tournament would leave us at 25-7 in D-1 games.  If we do worse than that, say 3-2 and 1-1, that will leave us at 24-8 in D-1 games and I don't think that gets us a top 4 seed.  Especially when you consider that last year we were 10-6 in a much stronger Big East and only got a 7 seed.

[Harrison]

I dont disagree with you assessment.  However, I persoanlly think the reason we were a 7 seed was because we entered the NCAA's with double digit losses.  that is a lot!  Not winning a BE tourney game hurt too.  We would have to go 1-5 to meet last years record pre-NCAA. We are in much better shape to receive a higher seed this year, but still gotta get it done