Even in an Off-Week, UDFN has Flyer Fever 24/7

It's barely a day-and-a-half old, but this is already feeling like one of the stranger weeks I've experienced in a while.

On one hand: it's a big fat week of Flyer Nothingness. Seven whole days with no new Flyer news, results, or input of any kind. Robbed of that usual stimuli, it should be a case of "out of sight, out of mind."

And yet, on the other hand: I'm all-too-conscious of what looms at the end of this week. A cataclysm at the D-Rena, to be broadcast worldwide on the ESPN Family. So forget the lack of stimuli... the Flyers are still very much on my mind, even if my mind doesn't quite know what thoughts to think about.

Surely, I can't be the only one?

Or maybe I am: I have no fricking clue what Tim is doing this past month but he ain't doing it here. And Secaur's dirty little secret is that he suffers from a severe emotional imbalance and cannot maintain a cogent thesis about the Flyers for more than 3 days at a time. In a world where he can go from predicting a 9 game winning streak heading into Temple all the way to volunteering to personally incapacitate Brian Gregory with his bare hands just to stop the man from coaching us straight into the CBI, you can see why he's not around checking with voluminous Flyer Thoughts. The blog was supposed to be a fun hobby, not something that causes one to be filled with murderous rage.

But I'm here. And despite the lack of fresh input, *I* can't stop thinking about the Flyers during this alleged off-week. I find they're mostly optimistic thoughts, at least, as compared to most of what I've seen passing as Flyer Discourse. Not naively optimistic (there's a bit of that out there, too, and I find it as laughable as the venomous and misguided pessimism), but I'm still excited for what is to come, rather than dreading it.

Or worse: considering it meaningless.

I think that's the mindset that I find the most troublesome at this point. People who get all whiny and indignant because Dayton has now already played its way into the NIT, and there's nothing to be done about it, and the season's over. Bottom line: anyone who says that DOES NOT KNOW WHAT WORDS MEAN. They should be forced to ride a short-bus to the Arena when parking in the Delco Lot, if you catch my drift.

Feel free to question our ability to do what it takes to cement our spot in the NCAA Tourney, if you want to have an intelligent discussion on the matter. But do not sit there an opine that we've already sealed our fate. Because if you do, what you are saying is that you not only predicted the Flyers to finish 25-5 or better, but that you believed that 25-5 WAS THE FLOOR for being considered for an at-large bid.

A few people might have said the former at the start of the season. But nobody said the latter. Nobody of consequence, anyway.

So why, now, in the first week of February, are people rushing to the nearest internet to type angry missives about the patheticness of our Flyers and the irrelevance of the rest of our season, now that we have 6 losses? Simple: because most people are stupid, but we have to humor them because if the internet has accomplished nothing else besides free and easy distribution of porn, it's democratized intelligence. Dumdum McGED's vote is worth as much as mine. Whee.

Way I look at it, I predicted a 23-7 regular season (11-3 OOC, 12-4 A-10), with that being more than ample to be an NCAA lock. Presently, RPIForecast.com backs this up, as our SOS is mighty (top 20 for our OOC schedule, and it'll end up being top 40 overall at the end of the season), and a 23-7 regular season would land us with an RPI in the top 25. Impossible to leave out of the Dance, really.

Even at 22-8, we remain a top 30 RPI team at the end of the year, and just because of the difficulty of our remaining schedule (and the fact that to reach 22-8 would still mean going 8-2 in the Selection Committee's precious "Last 10 Games"), we'd still have 3-4 regular season Quality Wins up against just the single Bad Loss (St. Joe's). We only really dip onto the Bubble (probably on the wrong side of it) if we stumble to 21-9.

Ergo:

(1) We're only really one game off the pace that I would have predicted, en route to my anticipation of a 23-7 finish. I had @Eggs, @Temple, and @Richmond pencilled in as losses, with the Flyers dropping one other random game, because that's what the Flyers do. Now: we've lost TWO other random games. And we did it back-to-back, which is probably why the angry shouty internet diptards decided to lose all sense of logic and fly off the handle the past week.

(2) 23-7 would be all well and good, but 22-8 will get the job done. Anybody who's written off the rest of the year because we have 6 losses is stupid. We have two more losses to give before a thinking person writes off the rest of the season. Until we give them, I say this is like baseball, and WE CONTROL OUR OWN DESTINY. We basically have a "magic number" next to our name in the standings. In this case, that magic number is currently 7.

(3) I'm not even prepared to say that this-game or that-game is a "must win" for our resume. Obviously, it would sure as hell feel good to bitchslap Eggs on Saturday, not just for reasons of blind personal hatred, but also because it's a quality win over a borderline top-20 RPI team. Others claim we need the "signature road win" @Temple now, because of how bad our resume sucks. Horsefeathers to all of that, says I! HORSEFEATHERS! Also: HOGWASH~! If we win 7 more regular season games, but default at least 1 of them will have to be a Quality Win (quite possibly 2 of them). That pairs up nicely with two pre-existing Quality Wins (GATech and ODU), and doesn't even get into what we'll have a chance to do to play add-on in the A-10 tourney (1 or 2 more Quality Wins are possible, depending on how the chips fall).

(3a) So to simplify: no one game on the remainder of the schedule is "must win." The only "must win" thing in my mind is the number 7. That's it: 7.

(4) Bringing the A-10 tourney into consideration, I think our other "magic number" to keep in mind is 24. If that's our number of total, overall wins on Selection Sunday, it's the one that makes us bulletproof. If we somehow still meet my prediction and finish 12-4 in the A-10, that means we just win one game in Atlantic City, in order to avoid another borderline "bad loss." If we hit 11-5, it means no bye, and we should AT LEAST win our game at home before advancing to AC, where we can make the Selection Committee's job easy by just getting one more Quality Win before crapping out in the semis; make the semis, and we're indisputably a top-4 team in what'll probably be a 4-bid conference. 10-6 or worse and, well, we pretty much have to win the tourney, which in a best case scenario probably means hitting 24 wins. Though if it's fewer than that, it won't matter, cuz they have to take us!

(4a) If you're some kind of schadenfreude enthusiast who can't wait for UD's 6th A-10 loss (9th overall), so you can come back and rub it in my stupid face that NOW the season is over, just you wait! Cuz I'll change my tune so fast, it'll make your head spin! Until we're ELIMINTED FROM THE A-10 TOURNEY, the season's not over. Nobody in this conference is really THAT much superior to us so as to make a neutral court game unwinnable (sadly, we're capable of such swings that nobody other than Fordham is that much inferior to us, either), and as long as there's an Auto-Bid on the table, I ain't ready to start talking about next year's recruits or whether CW will stay or go, dammit! I'm sticking with the 2010 Flyers until some point in mid-March, and there ain't nothing you poopy-pantsed pessimists can do to stop me!

To wrap up....

Saturday's home showdown with Eggsavier may be why I'm still Flyer Obsessed during this off-week, but as my mind wanders, it does tend to wander to the Big Picture. And despite the Sting of Pain after those back-to-back losses last week, the Big Picture is still looking alright. At least: we still control our own destiny, and don't have to rely on others to fade down the stretch. Feel free to rationally debate our ability to do so, but if we lose 2 or fewer games between now and March 6, we ARE dancing. Simple as that.

24/7, baby, those are the magic numbers. It's got a nice, easy-to-remember ring to it. 24/7, and the Committee doesn't matter. We'll have made the Selection for them. If you look at the data objectively, 23/6 should even keep us amply in the discussion and on the bubble, too. But I'd rather be in the Dance than in the Discussion, just to be on the safe side.

24/7... who's with me?


Rick