News, notes and reflections from the drive home following American's four-point win over Towson Saturday:

When you see American point guard Derrick Mercer for the first time, your first reaction is, “Who gave Gary Coleman a uniform?”

They list the freshman from Jersey City as 5-9 in the AU game program. You do understand that those program measurements are bullshit, right?

To say Mercer is small is to say A.U. basketball is overshadowed and overlooked in the D.C. area. You can try to pretend it is not so, but it is pretty obvious to everyone but the blind guy.

Garrison Carr is small, too, though even he looks big standing next to Mercer. If you saw him in street clothes, you’d never guess Carr was a college basketball player. Not even in Division 3. The kid just doesn’t look old enough to even be in college.

Forget his on court heroics. Four years from now AU fans will be able to look back at Carr and say “I remember the first time he shaved.”

Watch Carr shoot the ball, though, and he looks a little older. Carr has a veteran’s poise around the arc, never rushing his shots, never passing up an open look or hesitating to fire when it is there.

Carr was dialed in against Towson, knocking down four three-pointers in quick succession to bring AU back from 10 down in the first half to a 31-30 lead. It was all catch-and-shoot stuff. No beating guys off the dribble. But Towson still could not manage to get a hand in his face most of the night.

Just as Carr doesn’t play young, Mercer hardly plays small. Mercer has two gears, fast and turbo. He doesn’t spend as lot of time in fast. With a solid handle and a fearless demeanor, Mercer finds seems between the trees and darts through them with abandon.

“He is too small to get himself stuck down that low,” you think when he gets double teamed down on the low block by a pair of guys that would make three of him.

Then Mercer makes a little wrap around shuttle pass to Brayden Billbe for an easy layup.

Time and time again Mercer drove the lane and passed off. He finished with six assists. At least two or three of his four turnovers came when AU teammates were unable to get the handle on his creative dishes.

Rumor has it Mercer can finish, too. Saw little evidence of it against Towson, though. Mostly what you saw was Mercer penetrating, finding himself surrounded by big guys, then finding a way to dish to someone with the size to finish down low.

Between Mercer and Carr, the future looks bright for American’s backcourt.

It also looks awfully small. Only time will tell if the Eagles can get away with playing that small for long periods of time. With 6-11 Paulius Joneliunas unavailable until after finals, the Eagles are already extremely size challenged.

How small is AU? Consider this: When Linas Lekavicius comes off the bench to give Mercer a break, AU actually is going with a bigger lineup by subbing in a guy who is not even 6-feet tall.

At one point in the second half, AU actually had 6-3 Andre Ingram playing the four for a short stretch when Jeff Jones went small (of course by definition, right now every time Billbe takes a rest, Jones has to “go small”).

Right now, Carr plays the two, coming in to replace 6-2 sophomore Arydas Eitutavicius. But you have to wonder how much Jones will be able to get away with playing Carr and Mercer together. Not just this year, but over the next four.

Neither guy is expecting a growth spurt. As good as both guy seems to be, as much potential as they appear to have, it is hard to imagine being able to win at the Division 1 level when you run out a 5-9, 5-11 backcourt every night.

At least one of the two is going to have to become much better at scoring off penetration, too. Won't take long for film to ciruclate and coaches to notice that the way to stop Carr and Mercer is to put someone taller, which for most teams means anybody on their roster, on the little guys to take away their jumper.

Even then, it seems unlikely the two American freshmen will evolve into aany kind of Hamilton-Simmons or Bettencourt-Lee sort of duo.

Other observations from an afternoon visit to the nation’s capital:

Even in a small building like Bender, the announced crowd of 1,313 looked sparse. We didn’t count the fans on hand, but we could have. And we doubt we’d have had to use near as many fingers as the guys who came up with that announced figure.

The Screaming Eagles are badly in need of reinforcements. Their ranks appear to have fallen to Lehigh-like levels. And who are those dudes anyhow? They look like they were all in the pep club in high school. If not for those blue T-shirts, you’d take one look at the whole lot and figure the chess team must have gotten lost on the way to a match. There is a reason why they are here and almost no other American students are – the others can get dates.

Even if they could play extras in the next Revenge of the Nerds remake, those blue-shirted Screaming Eagles do deserve credit for their spirit. With a small crowd made up of mostly family members and girlfriends of players, a dozen fans working together can be certainly be heard. If you could give the Blue Shirts a Christmas present, it would be the same we’d give the guys who paint L-E-H-I-G-H on their shirtless chests night after night in drafty Stabler Arena. Just one night in their college career, we’d give them a chance to be a part of a college basketball crowd like the one in Sojka for the BU-Villanova game. Every basketball fan deserves a chance to see their team in that kind of atmosphere.

On hand for the game, a visiting high school team from South Africa. From what they displayed while taking part in one of the timeout on-court fans contests, we’d guess Jones is not recruiting any of them.

Jones’ recruiting seems to be taking more of a domestic turn. All five of this year’s freshmen are from the U.S.

According to Matt B. of the Patriot League Hoops Blog, AU’s apparent emphasis on foreign recruits was the work of former assistant coach Ryan (son of Dave) Odom. Odom is now an assistant at Virginia Tech, where the sophomore class includes kids from Mali, Puerto Rico and The Netherlands.

By the way, for those who might question Matt's dedication to his beloved A.U. Eagles, you should know that not only was he one of the few folks not related to a player to show up Saturday, but he also stayed after the men's game for the whole AU women vs. Penn affair.