Some early preseason thoughts about SIU

SIU ended last season on a down note - something that was hard to do given how bad their season was...with poor shooting, bad play, and sparse offense.
BUT -- they beat ISU in the Thursday night game and then had TOP SEED Missouri State all but buried on Friday before horribly blowing a 9 point lead inside of the final 3 minutes to let Missouri State escape by scoring the final 11 points of the game, and put the final nail in their coffin of a bad year.

Of their top 12 scorers from last season...

--Three have graduated - Carlton Fay, Jack Crowder, John Freeman. Fay was their leading scorer and team leader.

--Four more have been dismissed or sent packing in one way or another - Gene Teague, Troy Long, Mykel Cleveland, Jordan Myers.

--And three more will start the season under suspension according to several reports - Diamond Taylor, Davante Drinkard, Kendall Brown-Surles - with the latter two possibly being ineligible all semester.

That means only their 2nd (Mamadou Seck) and their 5th (Justin Bocot) best scorers return from their 13-19 campaign to start this season.

The rest of their current roster shows -

- FIVE freshman (Tony Bryer, Dantiel Daniels, Treg Setty, Josh Swan, and Harry Whitt)

- and a few new juco transfers (Early, Lindsay, Goff)

- Plus even the bench will have a different look with two new assistants - Ron Smith and Anthony Stewart.

Lance Irvin - supposedly their lead Chicago area recruiter - has been sent packing as well in addition to one other assistant Marcus Belcher.
Irvin may well have been canned - perhaps in response to how terribly all the Chicago area kids like Dillard and Hare turned out. In fact - given that Irvin's specialty was to land the top Chicago kids - and since SIU never gets or keeps any of those kids, I guess Irvin was expendable, making SIU the EIGHTH D-I program he's left in just a little over a decade.

This all makes me recall when that hyped recruiting class was coming in with Hare, Dillard and Top-30 recruit Booker - more than a few Bradley fans wailed that they wish we could land players like that.....ahem -- yeah right.......still wish for that??

Thankfully, though, the SIU people saw this coming and scheduled according to the ISU plan - pencilling in such cupcakes and NON-Division I opponents as Ohio Dominican, Northeastern, Chicago State, NIU, and SIUE in the early going....
Only home games with Saint Louis and Western Kentucky should produce much challenge even to their weakened squad...

But they had better get their ineligible players miraculously cleared by Dec. 22 because they will face Kansas State then UTEP or Clemson in the ESPN Diamond Head Classic.

Plus -- just look at the last few seasons as well -
The number of key players & starters who have left with eligibility remaining is well into double digits.... (Dillard, Booker, Evans, Hare, Cornelius, Roundtree, Bone, Wood, not to mention Foster & Dale...)

So needless to say fans want some change but this year's prospects look pretty slim given the lack of recognizable players.
And their press hasn't been kind either -- just this morning this column appeared....pretty much equating SIU's reluctance to address all the rumors of ineligibility with the fact that they are true and SIU wants to delay the inevitable fan reaction as long as possible.

http://thesouthern.com/college/siu/article_96d12104-e1ae-11e0-90e2-001cc4c002e0.html

It's hard to pick a possible starting lineup with just two experienced players returning & eligible.
But here goes...
Seck, Bocot, Lindsay, Early, Daniels

Then I would have to say they are going to be just about everyone's favorite to finish 10th in the Valley - so I predict that's where they'll be picked and not much that I have seen nor heard makes me think they're going to surprise anyone.

Lastly - the SIU message board is a place that you really just don't want to go. It is so filled with infighting, attacks, and hateful criticism of their own team and players, that there are no other boards anywhere in the Valley - maybe even all of D-I that compare -- although one was headed that way before being recently saved from self destruction by a few hard-handed slaps on the violators.

Anyway - even some of the hateful and miserable threads from a year ago are being brought back and nobody dares say anything positive without getting ripped by the haters. SIU fans are vicious.