A-Sun Week in Review

This might be the jinx the rest of the conference is looking for, but I'm prepared to say that Jacksonville just might be the real deal.

After a sub-par pre-conference run, even for an A-Sun team, Jacksonville has won 8 of 9. This weekend they swept G-W and Campbell at home. Up to this weekend, I pegged the A-Sun race as a 2-team battle between Belmont and ETSU. I still like Belmont as the favorite, but Jacksonville has earned their spot as the third team in the hunt.

And all hail Kevin Tiggs. Jonathan Rodriguez is far and away the best player in the league, but Tiggs is the best player on one of the top 3 teams. Against Stetson, he went off for 26 points and 12 boards. Of the ten best single-game performances this year against D-1 competition, Tiggs and Rodriguez have 4 each.

On the women's side, ETSU and Kennesaw lived up to the hype. The Lady Bucs came out on top 81-77, but they had to shoot 70% and hold KSU under 30% in the second half to get there. Siarre Evans had a huge second half, scoring 13 points on 4-5 FGs and FTs, plus 5 boards and 2 assists. In the second half. In this league, that's a good night.

The best question -- Now that Jennifer Bowen is back, will North Florida play like they did earlier? Bowen, UNF's leader in points and minutes per game, missed 8 games in December and January, returning to play 34 minutes off the bench in the Osprey's loss to Jacksonville a couple of weeks ago.

The results haven't shown up in the Win column yet. UNF was 5-3 in games Bowen missed, but only 1-5 since her return. Still, you can't help but believe getting one of your best players back should help.

UNF was one of the teams I picked early on to challenge Jacksonville for the conference lead. They are really well balanced, play a slow, deliberate pace, don't shoot a terrible lot of 3's, and at 0.72 PEP they guard the daylights out of you. They should be better than 4-5 in conference.

Especially this conference.