Leaderboard

There is a silver lining: Akron has the best facilities in the MAC, a great FBS opportunity for players to showcase their talent, and a competent president/ athletic director. Under Nemer and Goodrich, those advantages will pay dividends sooner rather than later and the only direction to go is up!!

Omitted is Groce's "putrid defense" explanation - opponents aren't "feeling" the Zips defense. We are undersized, soft, and disorganized. It's easy to shoot three's when you have zero fear of getting one swatted back in your face...when your opponent is sagging off and not respecting your range, when defenders are unnecessarily double-teaming and leaving great shooters wide open for corner three's. The Zips can phone-it-in on defense and out-shoot a lot of mediocre-to-bad teams. If that's our defensive MO I still think we're 16-2, or better, in the MAC. But we can't beat a high mid-major or decent P4 program with the pedestrian defensive efforts we've seen so far. That's a recipe for an NCAA Tournament 13-seed, and a 21 point round 1 loss. It was a gift to get Yale and Murray State on a neutral court, free from biased referees and raucous opposing crowds. And we didn't take advantage of it.

Washington is a very deserving national Champion. They are the best team that I have watched this year. 6 wins.......none of them at home win at Oregon State in round of 64 win at #5 SMU win at #12 Stanford win at #4 Maryland win over #16 Furman in college cup semis win over #15 NC State in finals has any team defeated 5 seeds and won all of their matches on the road on the way to the title?

Bump for updates and a few notes. - EMU signed the largest class in the first signing period, with many of the signees being freshmen. - Toledo has lost nearly half their freshmen signees due to the coaching change. I don’t think that matters much anymore with the portal having become the more relevant recruiting source, but I thought it was worth mentioning anyway. - Supposedly, UMASS has used their NIL funds towards retention of 15 players, and 13 of them have indicated they will stay at UMASS. - I’ll continue to update this thread as I see more activity.

It's no coincidence that the two kids who play the hardest on defense started tonight. I suspect the message got through.

I look at all those Q4 wins for the Zips and it makes me scratch my head. The names of those programs are far from what I think of as programs that are typically Q4… hopefully a bunch of them build their numbers going foward.

I do not know how you found that..

The Zips get a 10 days Christmas break before Concord comes to the JAR on December 29th. Concord currently stands at 6-3, playing a bunch of teams that belong on Captain’s list of teams he’s never heard of, including Frostburg State. In the confusing geography department, they’ve also played California of Indiana and Indiana of Pennsylvania. Kraig Gilbert, a 6’8” sophomore forward leads the Grapes in scoring at 19.2 ppg. 6’8” junior forward Boubacar Djigo averages a whopping 14.2 rpg to go along with 14.2 ppg. He played for Lutheran West in high school.

Imagine showing up in a foreign country just before the beginning of training camp. You barely speak the language. All the other players have been part of the program for month or even years. Everything is different. The food, intense practices like you have never experienced with a demanding coach, classes in subjects you never imagined and not to mention American women everywhere! I would call that culture shock!

The last memorable EMU game for me was a couple of years ago when Emoni Bates was 1-12 from the field and I think we were beating them by 50 points at some point in the 2nd half.

Neither Shammah, nor either of the Mahaffey brothers had strong games vs. Murray St. Yeah, we still put up 100 points but our defense is concerning. And Murray St. looked very good.

The state of Ohio seems to be doing quite well when you consider there's over 350 D1 schools and only two from Ohio are in the bottom half. Also, love to see that one of them is OU.

Elite offensive team (look between the Yale and Baylor logos).

If Wayne Campus had a team and beat Kent we'd never let them hear the end of it

Feels that way. The difference, though, is there’s plenty of potential returning, albeit with limited production at some positions. The roster JoeMo took over was badly depleted in both talent and depth across a number of positions. On top of that, a good handful of the returning players who had upside never developed and left after JoeMo’s first year. On the bright side, other teams across the MAC are losing starters and all-conference players as well, which could lead to 2026 being wide open again.

Yet another one developed by Coach JRod who had few to no offers coming out of high school, now heading out the door to get paid. What really stings about losing Morris is his ability to adequately play anywhere on the OL when needed.

This might be BGs year

Concord's?

UMASS opens their first conference game with a 10 point loss to Kent State. OU down by 15 mid-way through the 2nd to BG. Have to think this might be Boals’ last season with the program if it keeps trending this way.

Watching Halligan last night and he reminds me a lot of Brian Walsh. Similar game and almost identical size. I like what his size brings to our rotations.

Pretty loaded at TE with Cravaack and Newell, this doesn’t hurt like many of the others. I’m thinking there will be many more coming in the next week or so.

No Nate Johnson one-handed dunk disasters last night.

Wedding anniversary. Told my wife I love her so much, I'm skipping the game vs. EMU. Shot 17% from 3P and still put up 93 points while winning by 21. Alrighty then. That has to scare the crap out of the MAC lol. What an offense.

Goes to show you what a defender Greg Tribble was!

Go fix your white board, too. 😉

Really hope that remi comes back for at least one more season. The good thing about ncaa soccer is that we will find out in the spring games instead of being in the dark all summer

all aboard the halligan train

Catdaddy's keeping on top of this but I was also pleased to see the ABJ tracking the fluid situation

I like your distinction between playoff and invitational tournament. Let me expand on that... For me to take it seriously as a playoff, it would have to be setup like other NCAA Tournaments where conference champions get an automatic berth. This would discourage all of the ridiculous conference consolidation and ensure that, from the start of the season, everyone has a legit shot of winning the title (however stretched those odds may be). The fact that the ACC Champion (Duke) was excluded while a team not even eligible to play in its conference championship game got into the "invitational tournament" is ridiculous, regardless of other logical justifications.

Thanks for passing this along TennZip. Rarely do you read an article where the interviewed athlete has such mature and articulate comments. Jason is another example of the exceptional quality of young men who come thru the Akron soccer program.

Best facilities in the MAC? You need to visit Miami's football building. And before you point to InfoCision, remember that an empty stadium isn't much of a recruiting asset.

Lunardi has us as a 12-seed: https://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/page/bracketology/ncaa-bracketology-2026-march-madness-men-field-predictions?appsrc=sc&RuleNumber=Not Applicable&consent_mode=ccpa

Excellent article on Jason Shokalook. article has many quotes from Jason. https://rg.org/news/soccer/mls-next-pro-mvp-jason-shokalook-road-top-american-soccer

So in every tournament where a team wins five or six games, there is also a team that theoretically loses five or six. That team this year is Michigan. Washington beat NC State who beat St. Louis who beat Akron who beat Notre Dame who beat Michigan. Congrats Wolverines!

Well stated TennZip. UW has traveled an impressive road to the championship. Still, they did not face us. I think we are that good and would have given them the best test of all.

It is sad that so many negative articles around college football - we are named. Worst head coaching positions, game day atmosphere, academics, worst teams.

Offense wins. Houston is the one of the top defensive teams in the country and has been for several years. They have zero national championships in that span because in their final game of the season, they couldn't score more than their opponent. Akron isn't ignoring defense. Every single post game interview this season has included Groce harping that the defense needs to get better. However, if our opponent isn't shooting nearly 60%, we're winning by 20+. Akron has 3 losses, one of them to easily one of the best teams in the country. The other 2 losses, our opponent had to nearly set shooting records to outscore us; in fact, I'm not so sure they didn't. Those other 2 losses have been to some of the top mid majors in the country on neutral courts as well. I'm not so sure we lose to Yale if Barre is up to speed and playing significant minutes in that game, either. Defense is one of those things that takes longer to pull together with so many new pieces every single year in today's landscape. Shot making doesn't require chemistry and communication with rotations, help defense, etc. Maybe that's why we're seeing a shift at Akron and Kent. That being said, there aren't going to be many teams that will beat us this year without historic offensive performances because Akron's offense is legitimately that good. We've all seen Akron teams struggle to shoot 30% from 3. Didn't matter how good their defense was, they fell short plenty of times against competition that they shouldn't have because they couldn't put the ball in the hoop. The offense never came with those teams because teams can either score or they can't. Give me a team that can score at will with a coach who keeps defense a priority over a team that keeps defense a priority but struggles to score. I'm quite confident the defense will get better, but the blessing with this team is we don't have to pray for the offense to get better because history has proven that's not something that truly improves.

I'm not bored by college football. I just don't take it as seriously as the people who run it want me to. For example, Friday Im going to see a band call Parks Brothers play. The playoff will be on. Every once in a while I'll look at the screen to see what's going on. The point I'm making is this. As much as they want us to believe it's a playoff, it simply isn't. It's an invitational tournament and the winner is called the National Champion after. To me, they are at the same level of champion as they were when they used to vote for the national championship. They just go about it a different way.

One of my top 5 favorite games at the JAR

Thankfully, college basketball and NHL. The NBA is unwatchable, and beyond the Zips, college football bores me to death anymore.

Maybe the rest of the MAC should go for the easiest schedules possible (provided they win them). Gives us a shot at a real Q1 win.

And as a reward for Miami playing that extraordinarily difficult out of conference schedule, they start with cream puff Ball State.

Hopefully our coaching staff can stay in place for the foreseeable future and actually build something at UA. That is the one thing that has held us back. Hiring two of the worst head coaches in FBS history has dug us in a hole that is hard to come out of. Also doesn't help that people in NE Ohio only care about one college football team and it's not us. So there will always be this reputation that the Zips aren't a "real" school and our games don't matter.

Student for a day tickets are available in the Student Section. Got my tickets transferred to there.

I just remember being shocked at not only the dunk but the game as whole. I felt much better a week later when we won the MAC Tournament. 😆

All those things are true, but I wouldn't advertise regression to the mean as something we have going for us because by its very definition in our case, it highlights that we have traditionally been one of the worst programs in FBS/D1-A.

I think the spanking Murray State gave us is a blessing in disguise and yes it was a spanking. They could have easily beaten us by 25 if they didn't get called for so many moving screens. When we're beating Nobody U by 30 it's tough for Groce to convey to the team that the level of defensive play is unacceptable if you want to make noise come March. Now he has this game to point to as a reality check. Personally, I think our "havoc" or whatever defense you want to call it simply just doesn't work against teams that have quality perimeter play. It works against the cupcakes that have either inexperienced guards who are prone to turnovers or teams with poor perimeter shooters. When we play teams that can disect a defense all it does is leave an open shot at the basket or in the weak corner. If there is no defender within 8 feet of a 3-pt shooter those are pretty much practice shots. An elite 3-pt shooter, like Tavari, can probably knock down those specific wide open looks at or around a 65% clip.

I know/understand coaching goes through cycles, but it is a puzzle to me why two of the better most consistent and successful MAC programs the last decade or so -- built on a foundation of strong/solid defense (Akron and Kent) -- suddenly seem to turn into almost exclusively offensive programs with defense becoming clearly secondary. I don't get it. One look at Toledo, or Miami, should prove that is not the way to true success. Defense travels. Offense comes and goes.

Josh Hardin was a starter in 2024 and he transferred out. I highly suspcet that was due to Pittsburgh poaching him with huge NIL dollars.

Scratched out serial number on a gun.