Siena’s head coach, Fran McCaffery, has yet to finalize his schedule for the upcoming 2009-10 season. At first, you might assume that McCaffery has just been procrastinating for the last several months. However, this is far from the reason. McCaffery has in fact been working non-stop, placing calls to all 341 of the nations other Division I programs to try and fill in the schools remaining two games.
Finding the last two non-conference games to wrap up the 2009-10 schedule is an extremely difficult task for the Saints to complete. Not many Division I teams are willing to play the very underrated Saints team that has advanced to the second round of the NCAA tournament two years in a row. It is not just the potential upset possibility that scares off major conference opponents, but is also due to the Saints being a member of the MAAC, which does not exactly draw the media glamour like conferences such as the Big East and Pac-10 do.
With the season approaching sooner than most think, you might ask yourself why the Saints don’t just fill their two last games with a non-Division I team. Well, McCaffery has created a policy at Siena that says the school will only compete against those teams in Division I. He wants to challenge his team, which in return enables them to play at their highest level. Without this option the Saints are only left with one option and that is to play the waiting game and hope that other schools finally agree to compete.