Conference USA Sports blog covering C-USA football, basketball & baseball provided by the staff at CUSA-fans.com, C-USA’s leading sports fan site.
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For a second consecutive week, Conference USA East Division leader Southern Miss will play a primetime game on ESPN. Tonight, Jeff Bower and his Golden Eagles will tee it up against UCF at “The Rock” in Hattiesburg at 8p.m. (EST) and they will need to produce a second straight nationally-televised win if they are going to remain atop of CUSA’s East Division.
The Golden Knights (4-3, 2-1)–along with East Carolina (5-4, 4-1) and Memphis (4-4, 3-1)–are all in the thick of the East Division title hunt.
If Southern Miss is beaten by UCF, East Carolina will take over the division lead and control its own destiny. The Pirates would have the tiebreaker over UCF, which it beat 52-38, and they travel to Memphis next week.
UCF holds the tiebreaker with Memphis, as the Golden Knights thoroughly trashed the Tigers, 56-20 earlier in the season.
If Memphis were to win out, it would obviously need someone to defeat UCF. The Tigers will be pulling for USM, as ECU and USM are the next opponents up on the Tigers’ slate.
With summertime comes baseball, the 4th of July and ahh, yes, college football previews! With so many previews to choose from, we here at DFN Sports and CUSA-fans.com thought we would help you out a bit and put together the expected order of finish from three well-known nation college football magazines.
Street & Smith
Street & Smith’s preview gives the upper-hand to the defending C-USA East and West Divisional Champs as they see Southern Miss and Houston repeating and facing off in the Conference USA Football Championship game again in 2008.
C-USA East - Street & Smith
C-USA West - Street & Smith
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Lindy’s
Lindy’s sees things a bit differently in Conference USA’s East Division with Marshall finishing 4th instead of 2nd in the Street & Smith preview, however Lindy’s also picks a USM/UH C-USA Championship game. The West Division remains exactly the same as the preview above. Please note that the numbers to the right of each school name represent the Lindy’s national rank for that C-USA football team.
C-USA East – Lindy’s
C-USA West – Lindy’s
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Athlon Sports
The Athlon Sports Conference USA preview does not differ too much from the above previews, but they do have a different C-USA West Division winner; the Golden Hurricane of Tulsa. Only a couple of small changes in the overall order exist when comparing Athlon to Street & Smith and Lindy’s, so it seems the “experts†are all on similar pages.
C-USA East – Athlon Sports
C-USA West – Athlon Sports
Meanwhile, CUSA-fans.com also has their 2007 Conference USA football preview up on their Conference USA fansite, but unlike the above publications, they do not include a predicted finish for the 12 Conference USA football teams.
Tar Heels’ closer Andrew Carignan gets the Owls to go quietly in the ninth. With the win, UNC-CH (57-14) advances to face Oregon State in a rematch of last year’s title series. The best-of-three series begins on Saturday.
Rice concludes its an excellent season with a record of 56-14.
The Owls pushed across two runs and had runners on second and third with two outs. The Heels took out starter Adam Warren after he issued a leadoff walk to Jared Gayhart. Rob Wooten allowed a run on three hits and was lifted in favor of closer Andrew Carignan. Carignan got Joe Savery looking to end the inning on a horrendous third strike call that was more than a half a foot off the plate. It was so bad that the ESPN commentators have talked about it for nearly the entire bottom half of the inning.
Kyle Seager’s two-run single to center increased the Tar Heels’ margin to five at 7-2.
Adam Warren continued to shut down the Owl bats in the sixth, as he allowed only one baserunner and that was via a hit batter. Rice’s last hit was Aaron Luna’s leadoff single in the fourth.
Adam Warren sat the Owls down 1-2-3 in the top of the inning and has now recorded five consecutive outs.
Josh Horton led off the bottom of the inning with UNC’s fourth home run of the game–this one a blast to the right center field gap.
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Rice reliever Bobby Bramhall’s first pitch was crushed over the left field fence by North Carolina’s Seth Williams. The Tar Heels’ third home run of the game increased their lead to 4-2.
After Reid Fronk drew a leadoff walk, Tim Fedroff took Matt Langwell’s high fastball the other way and over the left field fence to give UNC a 3-2 lead.
Diego Seastrunk delivered a two-run single to right field in the top of the third, giving Rice a 2-1 lead. Warren escaped further damage by getting Joe Savery to fly out to left field, stranding runners on first and second.
Dustin Ackley, who broke out of a slump yesterday with his 2-of-5 performance, sent a Matt Langwell fastball well over the 400 foot fence in center to give the Tar Heels an early 1-0 advantage thru 2 innings of play.
Meanwhile, Warren has sat down the first six Rice batters that he has faced in order.
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