Countdown to Thursday

posted by David Cloninger, 3/01/2009 03:52:00 PM

"Up in the land with the ice and snow."
----------------- LED ZEPPELIN

Paul Collins and I have made it back despite a blizzard doing its best to swipe our trusty Mazda 6 into a ravine outside Murphy, N.C. Those boys at Hertz work them up right.

I'll be posting a story on this tonight, but I had to update after the Florida and Tennessee game.

The Volunteers won, 79-75, and improved to 9-5 in the SEC. They also swept the season series against the Gators.

USC (9-5) vs. Tennessee on Thursday for first place in the SEC East. The winner clinches at least a piece of the SEC East title. After that, the Gamecocks play at Georgia while the Vols host Alabama.

Remember, the tiebreaker only comes into effect for conference tournament seeding, so there can be multiple divisional champions. If Tennessee were to win, it'd get the tiebreaker and the No. 1 seed in the conference tournament (assuming the Vols also beat Alabama).

Also, the more I look at the stats from last night and think about it, the only problem the Gamecocks had was not showing up on defense for the first 10 minutes. Vanderbilt got confident too early and USC never could get over that first deficit. I'll be discussing that this week as well, leading up to Thursday.

Hope everybody is staying warm and enjoying the fifth, count 'em, fifth straight baseball win over Clemson. As a columnist whom I greatly respect once wrote, the Gamecocks ought to hire Ray Tanner to coach every one of their teams against Clemson.

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