This may change...but:

West-
NT
ASU
UD
ULL
UALR
ULM

East-
WKU
FAU
USA
MTSU
FIU
Troy

I don't see a giant drop off for Denver, and you know my man-crush on Rohnert...ULL brings back enough in Bureau, Diagle and Gradnigo to compete...ULM could be bad, like UNO bad, they'll have 11 ships to work with, 1 is sitting out due to transfer rules. Fred Brown may be NCOY, but he Sykes and Gilbert really have little help.

I'm not betting against WKU...FAU adds size in Davis and White next to Royster to compliment that nice backcourt...USA looks good, but there are already some off-court issues brewing...FIU may have the most talent, but, you know, that guy coaching

I don't see Denver getting better, and even a slight drop in results makes them mediocre. Like I said, a 2 game swing makes them 10th instead of 5th or 6th in the standings.

It's a fight for best-of-the-middling between UALR, ULL, and Denver. Like I said... It's a steep decline past ASU. I like UALR more than most people might because they've got an old team and I think they were better than their results last season. Plus, they've got a Latino guard with a hyphenated last name, and we all know that players like that are serious trouble.

I hear you about WKU. I would have put them in first, but all off-season I've been reading propaganda from our hairless Hilltopper superpal about how McDonald is killing their program and their recruiting hasn't kept up with the outgoing talent. They start with a savage OOC schedule that he thinks is going to destroy the whole year because it's such a young team. He's convinced that they'll struggle to break .500 on the year, even if they get hot in conference play.

I already figured that FAU 2009-10 plus a year of seasoning was going to be good enough to challenge for the East title. The WKU self-loathing convinced me to downgrade the Hilltoppers.

USA winning wouldn't surprise me, but I don't think they were as good as last year's team of FAU little leaguers, and USA lost Sherrer to graduation. I know they had a lot of injury problems last year, but Sherrer's breakdown was the one that seemed to knock the wheels completely off.

We'll see how it all plays out. I think it's interesting that, histrionics and threats of waxing aside, all of us seem to have a pretty similar expectations for the conference next year.