...and a busy Saturday

I love this time of year when we have multiple BC sports going at the same time. After an interesting and busy Friday in Boston College sports, we'll have just as busy of a Saturday. At 6:30pm, your Boston College men's basketball Eagles will face the Minutemen of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst at the TD Garden. UMass's 7-0 record might fool you, much like Indiana's 6-0 record might have, but the Minutemens' best win this season (according to Ken Pomeroy's rankings) was Rider. Yeah, exactly.

The Eagles, meanwhile, have now won four out of their last five games, beating teams from the Big 12, Pac-10, and Big Ten along the way. They might not do a lot this year, and they might have their struggles as they go on, but this team is a lot of fun to watch. You have to respect the intensity that Coach Donahue has infused into this team, doing a lot with little depth. There's a long way to go, of course, but you have to like BC's odds of moving to 6-2 by taking down their Commonwealth rivals, over whom they are 8-point favorites amongst the Vegas bookies. The game will be on Comcast New England, which is Channel 630 for DirecTV people like me.

One final word on BC basketball: We now know that this team plays an up-tempo offensive game. A stat I found very interesting, however, comes once again from Ken Pomeroy: according to his rankings last night, the Eagles have the 7th-most efficient offense in the country, and second only to Duke in the ACC. Another suggests that BC has the 4th-best offensive turnover percentage in the nation, which is tops in the conference. Yet another stat has us at the top of the ACC in free throw percentage, something which plagued BC teams in years past. It's still early, but these are some real improvements we've seen already in the Eagles' play since last year.

The second game of a home-and-home hockey duel against the Boston University Terriers will start about an hour later at Conte Forum. We all saw the smackdown the Eagles laid on the other Comm Ave school last night, so it will be interesting to see how BU responds, especially given their four-goal third period to trim the deficit. It will also be interesting to see how many goals BC has left in them. This game, like yesterday, will also be on CBS College Sports (DTV 613).

Of course, I won't see any of it, because I'll be having a lot of fun on my Saturday night. So long suckers! I mean, uh, enjoy the games.