Big Day of college basketball today. In the Big East, the marquee game will be the first real game for WVU and UConn as they face off down in Morgantown (2pm ESPN2). I’m more than a little curious about how each team will react to a foe that is not there simply to cash a check.

That, of course, leads in perfectly to tonight’s game against Florida A&M (PDF). The bad news to me, Mike Jarvis will be providing the color commentary. Nothing like some hack, cheating, incompetent coach who doesn’t say anything bad about anyone because he wants back into coaching providing insights. John Sanders is okay. I here him often enough calling MAC football and Cleveland Indians games that he doesn’t bother me.

This is a game, even with the expected win, that will drop Pitt’s RPI.

Florida A&M lost to Florida by 15 points (72-57), but it lost to Illinois by 21 (84-63) and was hammered by Maryland (93-54), Bradley (107-75), Illinois-Chicago (75-57) and Miami (Ohio) (52-33).

The Rattlers, who have an RPI of 205, also eked out a 66-65 against North Florida (1-10) in their previous game. And three of their six victories were against non-Division I teams Warner Southern, Edward Waters and Albany, Ga., State. They also beat Savannah State and Bethune-Cookman, both of which are considered among the worst 10 programs in Division I.

In other words, Florida A&M appears to be the perfect opponent for a Top 10 team in need of an easy tuneup before conference play.

Uh, yeah. The team seems to be past the little nagging injuries. Naturally there are half-hearted attempts to build up the opponent.

“They’ve played a few teams real tough,” Gray said. “They have some good players. It’s going to be a good test. If you overlook one team, that’s when they make it a close game or even beat you.”

Said Young, “They seem like they shoot it well.”

That’s fine and okay with me to end the non-con with a patsy. Especially with the BE schedule about to kick in rather harshly — at Syracuse, USF (okay, that’s not the harsh part), at DePaul, Georgetown, UConn and Marquette. All in eighteen days. That DePaul to UConn stretch is a 6 day period. That’s going to be the brutal part since it’s at DePaul and you just don’t know which Blue Demon team will appear.