Know Your Saints: Previewing Siena

The seedings are done, the brackets are set, and now it's time to play some basketball. As always, the top teams in the tourney are household favorites such as UCLA, North Carolina, and Duke. But at the same time, there are a bunch of scrappy, lovable underdogs who burst onto the national scene by virtue of winning hallowed league tournaments such as the Big Sky or the MEAC.

Anyways, our Commodores have drawn one of those mysterious underdogs in the Siena Saints, who went 13-5 in the MAAC (no, that's not a typo, that's the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference), and 22-10 overall. So, who are these Saints? And where the hell is Siena? Read on, my friends, read on...

For starters, Siena is located in Loudonville, New York, which is just outside of Albany (interesting fact: I have been going to Loudonville for Thanksgiving since I was about 5 years old. It's a pretty nice place). It is home to about 3,000 undergraduate students and, according to their website, "admission to the college is competitive." A bad omen for Vanderbilt: Siena is affiliated with the Catholic church, so they will have God on their side. Then again, we have Shan Foster.

Alright, now to the basketball. The regular season MAAC co-champs clinched a tourney seed by blowing out Rider in the championship game by 21 points. Key wins include a shocking 79-67 victory over Stanford in November, and... that's really it. The only other big-time opponents that Siena has played are Syracuse, St. Joseph's, and Memphis, and the Saints lost those contests by a combined 58 points.

Siena is young- only one senior is on the roster- and have a trio of high scoring players who average over 15 points a game. Sophomore Edwin Ubiles leads the squad with 17.3 points a contest and classmate Alex Franklin is tops on the team with 8.0 boards a game.

What Siena lacks is size, as their resident big man, junior Josh Duell, stands at a "mere" 6'7'', the same height as Andre Walker. They do have three guys that are 6'9'', but none of them are significant contributors. And Franklin, their top rebounder, is shorter than Shan Foster at 6'5''. As long as A.J. Ogilvy gets plenty of touches, we should be fine.

People on the Siena bandwagon (including that stupid guy on CBS) may point to their excellent guards when arguing for an upset. I have one thing to say to these foolish people: Please. Do they really think that Jermaine Beal, Alex Gordon, Shan Foster, and Keegan Bell can't handle anything that Siena will throw at them? As an added bonus, the emergence of Jamie Graham as a super lock-down defender and energy guy will certainly help to stifle Ubiles and company.

Siena has a pretty good basketball tradition. This is their fourth dance in program history, the last coming on 2002, where they beat Alcorn State in the play-in game. They also placed third in the NIT tournament in '94.

So, now you know everything you ever wanted to about this quaint little college in upstate New York.