Here's a link to the official Lafayette "summer prospectus". Seems the SID at LU has a bit of extra time on his (her?) hands to put something like this together, but hey, I have extra time to analyze it so we're even.

The gist of the prospectus is that they're returning four starters-- not sure whether that's good or bad considering their record last year. You heard it here first -- none of these guys is the new Brian Burke. The best of them, Justin DeBerry, made the Patriot League 2nd team last year--not so great if you're the leading scorer, but it gives them some sort of hope.

The most remarkable thing is that there are eight new players on this team. AU did a similar thing its first season in the PL, putting together a roster that looked quite different than the previous year, and it worked well for them. The one guy that stands out of all the new players is Sean Knitter (6-8 260), a transfer big man from Delaware. Don't be suprised if either he or, more likely, Jamie Hughes take a lot of Rob Dill or Mike Farrell's minutes. The difference between Hughes and Dill is that Hughes is big and Dill is tall.

Here's last year's RPIs for their non-conference schedule, and the conferences the teams are in:
129 - Rutgers (Big East)
231 - St Peters (Metro Atlanctic Conference)
172 - LaSalle (A10)
84 - Drexel (CAA)
90000 - two d3 nothings
212 - Binghamton Kornheisers (America East)
147 - Princeton (Grass)
111 - Southern Cal (Pac-10)
325 (!) - Columbia (Should have hired Kareem, at least they'd sell tix)
292 - Cornell (Grass)
59 - Penn (during the middle of the conference schedule)

Not too shabby. If you looked at that list again, without the RPIs, would you say Drexel was their strongest OOC opponent? The RPI is weird, but it's the formula that runs everything in March. It messes up the whole league that Lafayette is playing what the RPI says is the third worst team in DI. These guys won two games last year (they beat Army, how embarrassing for the Jim Crews crew). Bucknell played them last year too--so the league's RPI took a dive. But the dates at Rutgers and LaSalle are promising -- LU could knock off either of these guys. Princeton may be tougher, but it's not unrealistic. Penn.. hey, AU took Penn to the last 2 minutes in the last two years, maybe LU can do it. Maybe the ads for American Juniors won't annoy the hell out of me next time I see them. Maybe.

Lastly, LU sounds pissed about their road schedule: "Lafayette is forced to play four-straight conference road games from Jan. 30 to Feb. 11, traveling to Navy, American, Colgate and Army." They have two weekends of road games! I'm not sympathetic.

Next: Some links, some info on recruits...  @ 9:39 AM