Have you seen Stewart Mandel's Spring Picks over at SI.com?

There are three Big East teams listed in the lower half of his first top 25 for the Spring and one team in position 26, and none of them are the Scarlet Knights. Maybe he feels burned about putting the Knights at #12 in his 2007 Spring power rankings, or picking us to go to the Rose Bowl last year.

He has the Mountaineers down at 14, the Cincinnati Bearcats at 22, the Pitt Panthers at 25, and the Connecticut Huskies as the first of five teams "On the cusp". He doesn't mention in this first ranking how the four Big East teams in the bottom of the conference -- Rutgers, USF, Louisville, and Syracuse -- are ranked in his mind at this point in the preseason, but the Scarlet Knights look like they're going to need some big wins, with style points, to make an impression on the pollsters this fall.