Colonial Athletic Association
March 4-7. All games at Baltimore.
kPOY: Juan’ya Green, Hofstra.

The CAA tournament begins Friday evening with two first round games in Baltimore.

Hooray for the CAA! That is the theme of this year’s tournament. Actually if the tournament logo is any indication, the theme involves a crab in some way. But without too many people west of the Appalachians noticing, the conference ranked ninth nationally. It wasn’t so much that the league’s members racked up a bunch of quality non-conference wins. But the top teams were competitive in nearly all of their non-conference games against top-level teams.

The lack of a high-profile team or a clear frontrunner surely hurt the league’s chances at notoriety. The top eight teams rank from 74 to 155 and that means the CAA tournament is perhaps the most wide open of any conference tournament this month. The favorite doesn’t even have a one-in-four chance of winning and seven teams have at least a 6% chance of a title. You can’t even count out Elon at 2.5%. A day after Hartford nearly led wire-to-wire at Albany in a game it had a 4% shot to win, anything seems possible. (Except for Delaware winning.)

                          Qtrs Semis Final Champ
 2 UNC Wilmington          100  66.6  44.6  23.6
 1 Hofstra                 100  74.5  38.4  22.2
 4 James Madison           100  55.0  31.1  18.2
 5 William & Mary          100  45.0  23.2  12.5
 3 Towson                  100  50.9  19.4   7.1
 7 College of Charleston  82.1  31.3  17.3   7.1
 6 Northeastern            100  49.1  18.3   6.6
 8 Elon                   70.8  21.1   6.6   2.5
 9 Drexel                 29.2   4.3   0.7   0.2
10 Delaware               17.9   2.1   0.4   0.06

CAA tourney records (since 1999)

UNC Wilmington 19-12
Northeastern   11- 9
Elon            1- 1
Delaware       11-13
Hofstra        11-14
William & Mary 11-17
James Madison   9-16
Towson          7-13
Charleston      1- 2
Drexel          6-14