http://www.andthevalleyshook.com/2009/2/10/754755/mississippi-state-preview
The strange thing is, for all the talk of how weak the SEC West was, this division just might have the two best teams in the conference. LSU and Mississippi State are both playing very well right now and honestly I have a hard time deciding who is the better team.
This may be the biggest game of the season for LSU so far. It’s a big game, but it is laden with opportunity for LSU to make some huge strides on reaching its goals this season. It’s a conference road game against a tournament-calibre team, so the opportunity is there to build a tournament resume. I think a win here would put us on pace to be a comfortable tournament team.
Also, because LSU won the opening game between these two teams and because LSU is a 1-loss conference team while MSU is a 2-loss conference team, a win against on Wednesday for LSU would give us a huge cushion in the SEC West. This will be our 9th game of conference season, leaving 7 left after this. If we win, we are two games up on the second place team in the West with the tie-breaker in hand. We would in reality be 3 games ahead of our closest divisional competition with 7 games to go. Only 2 of those 7 remaining games would be against tournament level competition (Kentucky and Florida).
And that, of course, highlights the danger of this game. We are winning the SEC at the moment, but we don’t have a lot of good wins. We’ve beaten MSU once, and we’ve beaten South Carolina and Tennessee, who are also tourney-calibre teams. We beat Washington State. Other than that, that’s it. We lost to Utah, to Xavier (though not a bad loss, we didn’t get the win), and to Texas A&M. We don’t exactly have a killer resume at the moment.
andthevalleyshook.com
2/10/09
Magnolia Tribune
