Sat Night In Memorial Gym

These are my thoughts about the Vandy/SC tonight....

Its all good experience for these young men; that is, playing both of the div leaders consecutively. SC has an exciting, terrific team that you almost just can't help but root for. I know that I've been picking them to win the East for a while now. I believe that VANDY, because its in Memorial while the rest of the 'Cocks games will be played at home, could be considered to be their toughest remaining gm.

I think Downey will shine as usual but I wouldn't be surprised to see Jeff Taylor have another 20+ performance as he did in the previous mathup in Columbia. I think Jermaine will have a big game and so will Brad, who has been pretty steady of late....

Sat night in Memorial playing the SEC Eastern Div leaders on national TV; a chance for redemption. I say VU takes em in a gut wrencher. Brad drains a dramatic three late to retake the lead. After a basket by Zam Frederick, Vandy has the ball, down one, with 16 sec's remaining. Jermaine misses his shot but he is fouled. He calmly steps up and hits both free throws to give VANDY the lead with 6.7 sec remaining. This is plenty of time for Horn to set up a play for Downey to have one more shot at the buzzer for the win . . . but no! ... the shot misses and VANDY hangs on for the huge one point win, 81-80!

Braves Talk

" Great defensive 1B"....Kotchman sounds like the kind of 1B that would fit in just fine with Bobby Cox to me; especially with his not quite, but seemingly darn near, totally revamped and loaded, rotation. Someone mentioned the Angels successful formula of solid pitching and defense to go along with a lineup full of solid, steady, reliable, professional hitters up and down.... So Casey's #'s at 1B would seem to fit in nicely with a few other guys, or platoon situations, whatever the case may be. Lets see, you've got Kelly, Yunel, and Kotchman, with hopefully Frenchy and our CF platoon all putting up basically similar #'s to go along with Chipper and McCann. So now perhaps we add another one with a GA/Diaz platoon. You can see the possibilities. Anderson will be a great platoon player with Matt Diaz. He's a solid, professional hitter and will be a good addition to the team. He's headed to join spring training. The combined salaries of Matt Diaz and GA will be about 3 1/2 million dollars which for that amount of money you've got yourself a pretty decent left fielder.