It is assumed the University of Vermont men’s basketball team, as the No. 2 seed, will play No. 7 New Hampshire in the quarterfinal round of the America East Conference tournament.
Not so fast.
There’s a chance the Catamounts’ quarterfinal opponent will be Maryland-Baltimore County, the eighth-place team in the nine-team league. UVM coach Mike Lonergan said before practice today that he was told the tournament bracket is not yet official.
Pete Thamel of the New York Times reported on his Twitter page this afternoon, “the America East and Binghamton are deciding if Bearcats should play in conference tournament.”
If fifth-place Binghamton doesn’t participate, there’s a possibility the tournament’s play-in game would be eliminated and seeds re-organized.
With that scenario, top-seeded Stony Brook would play last-place Albany in the the quarterfinals.
“I don’t think it’s a good situation because we are trying to prepare for whoever we play on Saturday and we have practice (today),” Lonergan said. “We are just going to work on shooting and work on our offense and different things. Because you don’t want to waste time preparing for UNH and then all of sudden you are playing UMBC. Hopefully that decision will be made in the next couple hours and we can move on and speed up our game preparation.”
The America East has yet to announce the official match-ups of the men’s or women’s basketball tournament on its Web site.
Tags: Binghamton, uvm men's basketball
March 1, 2010 at 3:14 pm |
[…] not official, that since there will be no #5 seed, the entire bracket will be reseeded, and UMBC, at the #8 spot could be playing number #2 Vermont. This isn’t official yet, so the schedule on the left side of the page will not be changed […]