kreed5120

I honestly feel many are in denial about the state of our program moving forward. As @LZIp shared we have the smallest football operating budget in the MAC and little to no NIL. Realistically no proven coach is going to want this job. Odds are much higher that we will end up with another Ianello or Arth. 5-7 wins are about all we can expect under our conditions. There needs to be real vision behind the program if we want a chance to succeed. Boosters either have to step up big time or Akron needs to play more P4 games and invest that money we receive from OSU, Purdue, Iowa, etc. back into the program. Probably need to do some combination of both. I'm not sold on Joe as our long-term solution because frankly I don't think he sells the program well to boosters or local businesses, which is what's needed in this new age of college athletics. IMO Joe should enter next season on the hot seat for 2 reasons. One is the school literally can't afford a $1 million buyout. This isn't pro sports. We don't have a billionaire owner. Two is we need to develop a long-term plan to how we're going to improve this otherwise it's just going to be groundhogs day. New coach, very much all the same problems.

Key to victory is just showing up lol

I thought coming into the season Kent would go 1-11. They still aren't good, but their new coach was put into a tough situation and overachieved. I already miss Kenny Burns.

I know we technically have 4 new starters, but we seemed to have returned a lot more minutes compared to most teams as we returned pretty much all our bench players and then elevated them to bigger roles. Of the new players added to this years rotation thus far Eric already had 1 year learning the system in practice and Evan was born to play this style of basketball. That leaves only Ognjen who admittedly seems to still be adapting. Meanwhile, other teams have 5, 6, 7 new players in their rotation. It gives us a huge advantage this early in the year.

I didn't like the call either, especially since it put us down 8. Meaning we would still have to convert a 2-point conversion from an equal distance to tie it up anyway.

I don't think they have much NIL, which is one of their problems. I think only Akron, Miami, UMass, and maybe OU have money. I feel all the other schools just spend on football.

If you exclude the non-D1 schools.

Hard to take college football attendance numbers seriously. I'm not sure if it's still a requirement, but it used to be every 2 or 3 years a school had to average 15k fans to remain FBS compliant. You would see schools, like Akron, buy 10s of thousands of tickets from their athletic department to remain compliant. That's why if you go back and look you will see Akron averaged 15k fans 1 year, but average 8k the next.

Kenpom this early in the year is mostly weighted by preseason expectations. As more games get played they fade the preseason expectations out. I'm not saying whether or not UNCW is good, but I wouldn't place too much stock in kenpom this early into the year. We should have a better picture by mid December.

It's up to Akron to produce the games. If it's not on ESPN+ then it would be because for whatever reason we didn't decide to produce it.

Arkansas State and Marshall are the two that jump out to me.

I made a comment before, I think a good compromise is for the MAC to have 3 midweek games per week. The rest being on Saturday. That would make it so that each team would only have to play midweek twice (once at home and once on the road). That would allow midweek TV spots to be filled and will give fans 1 more Saturday game to attend.

Remember after BG beat Toledo some said we should fire JoeMo and look for the next Eddie George?

I would expect to see us play more zone and send hard double teams to force Purdue bigs to pick up their dribble. We'll then have to rotate as best as we can on the perimeter. The reality is they will end up with some wide open looks, but we need to pray they have an off shooting night. That's kind of our only hope. Edit: I don't have much hope for a win, but if we can stay competitive for a full 40 minutes, I'll mark it down as a positive performance.

Yes, not like it's in an undeserved area either. Its like 25 minutes away from YSU. About an hour outside of Akron and Pittsburgh. There are plenty of other places for those students to go.

Yes, I don't understand it either. Especially since there are a lot more games in a college basketball season.

New Haven is in it's first season of D1. Penn State probably felt it was easy practice for their players to get experience playing on the road without the risk of losing. Edit: I can't imagine it has much, if anything, to do with money. Pay games in college basketball aren't 7 figure costs like football. Penn State could have found a home game for under $100k if they really wanted, which to them is pocket change.

Remember he won 3 NCAA tournament games in a span of 4 years at OU. I also think you forget having NIL money is only part of the puzzle. UMass has significantly more money than Akron, but from what I've watched they look pretty mid. A coach still has to be able to identify talent, develop players, and get them to fit in their system. Tod meanwhile is in his 24th year as a D1 coach, 16th at Toledo, and has never made the Big Dance. NIL has only been a factor for 2-3 years so that can't be an excuse. Even if you exclude his Akron tenure, Groce had more success in 4 years at OU than Tod has had in his 24 years as a D1 coach.

We're two games into the season. The teams ahead of us are going to mostly all still be 2-0. A few might be 1-1 with a ranked loss. It's not like we've beat anyone that would catch voters attention this early in the season. Generally voters don't drop teams that win.

No

It looks like March has come early for Toledo. They blew a double digit half-time lead and currently trail Marshall by 10 with under a minute left to play.

Brisco looked even worse. I can see why MMK is the main backup for Lyles at the moment. I haven't looked at the boxscore yet, but I did notice a few key plays MMK made again today.

Yes, I imagine Princeton is on par or better than half the MAC.

Barre sighting

Akron football definitely has some amount of money. Bud helped setup their NIL a year and a half ago. He talked about it in an interview. It's just a very small amount they have, perhaps smallest in the MAC. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Now that the NCAA allows schools to pay players directly Akron needs to schedule 3 P5 paycheck games a year. Take half the money collected from games 2 and 3 and invest it in the roster. That would generate an additional $1M-$1.5M in NIL. The MAC is garbage. We can go 1-3 in OOC play and still go 5-3 to make a bowl as can be seen this year.