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So much arguing you know it’s an off day😂. So excited to watch this team play again

What an awesome rookie season for Beto. Game winning goal in the US Open Cup v NYCFC. Winning pk in the Eastern Conference semifinal. Winning pk in the USL Championship final. Friendly with Puerto Rico National team v Argentina on the field playing against the GOAT, Messi.

It's the toughest part and one that I don't think Akron is set up to do. It's cultural throughout a university that is successful at it.

UAB player stabbed 2 of his teammates this morning at the team facility... https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/47061708/uab-football-player-arrested-stabbing-two-teammates

Riverhounds win the USL Championship title on Beto Ydrach PK. 5-3 shootout. what a fantastic rookie season for our Zips Mens Soccer alum. 🏆

You’re right I was looking at last year’s NET. Is it too much for me to ask that the numbers speak for themselves? Let teams jump around for a couple of weeks until the dust settles. Again, either be objective or subjective. Don’t use polling in a metric people. Good grief.

ESPN+ it should be on.

ZIPS on TV tomorrow?

NET hasn't been updated yet for this season. You're looking at last years numbers. It's not until early December that NCAA starts posting the rankings. Kenpom uses preseason rankings in their numbers to help smooth things for the first few months of the year. Those rankings get phased out as the season progresses. I think it's around mid-January when they fully remove them. NET waits until December to start publishing the current season rankings as they don't use preseason rankings in their numbers so it takes until December for there to be enough data points to form a ranking. Even then the first few weeks the NET is weird. It probably isn't until January that it looks normal.

I’m not smart enough to tell you the difference between the metrics. Even if they use the same criteria they must weigh them differently. Look at the difference pertaining to Purdue. Kenpom has Purdue ranked 2nd and the NET has them at 19. All of the national polls see Purdue as a top 1 or 2 team. To me, Kenpom is just more believable. I should do a test. Document the rankings at the end of non-conference and see how these metrics adjust by the end of conference play. Something seems squirrelly. And I completely agree, half the time the committee is objective and the other half subjective.

For regular season games, yes for NCAA tournament, NCAA has different rules

It's so ridiculous that we have to start a thread like this. You should be able to go into any area Walmart, JC Penney, Kohl's, Target, etc. and find a selection of merchandise. I don't get why the university keeps dropping the ball on this. Plus those posts about another new bland apparel piece are unexciting. Quit trying to maximize profit and sell most stuff through the bookstore. The idea is to get your name and logo out there in as many places as possible at reasonable prices then the money will come. Old man rant finished.

NET is very similar to KenPom. The formula isn't exactly the same, but the basic concepts are. It's more about how the committee analyzes the data than the metric itself. I've even seen graphics where the committee breaks out Q1 wins into top 25 wins and non-top 25 wins to give further bonus points to a SEC that might have went 9-9 in conference play over mid-majors that picked up Q1 wins over other high quality mid-majors. Who you beat and who you lost to are already built into the numbers. Why do they feel the need to keep moving the goalposts?

You should go back and read what I wrote. I literally said in my post Akron would be the one game that would be good for them to schedule in the MAC. The rest not so much. There are very few G5 programs consistently as good as Akron year over year. You schedule a home and home with them and they might be good for the 1st year, but garbage the next. Another point is you don't know for certain who the top 100 teams will be until months into a season. Even the teams that might have had high preseason expectations might not live up to them or a team nobody expected emerges.

Also, I realize the NET is here to stay and it’s the metric we must use to justify our participation in the NCAA Tourney. But I do not see it as the better tool for evaluating a teams performance over Kenpom. I think the NET is the P5 cartels tool to distort reality, not better understand reality. And when everything is based on “quality wins” played on the cartels home courts with home refs you have further distortion. Garbage in means garbage out.

My prediction is that the P5 cartel will continue to concentrate their financial power and control. Perhaps breaking off into their own super league making them essentially the new D1 and turning the rest of D1 into D2 and so on down the line. They will just assume that their business model of paying the best players in the country big money will maintain their elite status. But all it will take is for 1 really great team in the new D2 to refuse to play for them or with them to cast doubt on the whole project. At that point negotiations will take place or the NCAA will completely implode and we start again with who knows what.

Actually Bobby Bowden is dead. You are missing the concept buddy.

You are entirely missing my point. Power conference teams shutting you out? Fine. Go play top 100 road games at schools like Akron. LSU is 89 NET, Florida State is 90 NET, Akron is 91 NET, Oklahoma State is 95 and Minnesota is 96. A win at Akron will probably end up in the same quadrant as a win vs any of those other power conference programs. At the end of the year, if there's an at large debate and someone gets snubbed because Akron isn't named LSU/FSU/MIN/OSU, then you can complain about the corrupt system. To intentionally avoid those solid G5s, especially on the road, is malpractice and hypocritical because that's exactly what power conference schools do.

Aren't all students free any more?

The committee's main complaint about conferences like MVC or A10 getting at-large bids is SOS and lack of quality wins. Playing the directional Michigan's and the other dumpster fire MAC teams would feed that narrative. It would make sense for a GW or a Duquesne to schedule a school like Akron, which has consistently been in or around the top 100 for a few years now, but mostly everyone else in the MAC is a waste. Toledo a few years back would have been solid too or Buffalo before that. The real problem is the selection committee. If they offered more incentives for those games getting played, they would be scheduled. The problem is the cartel of the P5 (including Big East) has stacked the deck so that they take all the at-large bids and all the other 27 conferences have to fight over maybe 2-3 at-large bids in total.

That's fine, props to St. Bonnie. I still maintain the GW coach doesn't have much of a leg to stand on. A10 is looking pretty solid to start the year. We will see how they end up. If they continue to be a legitimate 1 bid league (not a snubbed one), it's even more pathetic that they won't play more game at schools like the MAC teams.

A conference is more than just a few programs. I think it makes sense to recognize programs that schedule those games that you talk about, like a St. Bonaventure, while chastising those that don't. I don't think the A10 is loaded this year. They will likely be 1 bid, just like the MAC.

Last year was GW's first winning season since 2016-17. They've been middle of the road at best, and largely a bottom feeder in those 8 or 9 seasons. If GW had been a powerhouse with the status of Dayton or VCU, are they playing at American (still hard to give them credit for this considering it's essentially a home game in DC) or ODU? Who knows, but history would tell us no. Go look at VCU's & Dayton's schedules this year for reference; zero lower end road games, and Dayton actually has FSU coming to Dayton for a game. My issue is with the hypocrisy of the GW coach complaining about MTEs creating exclusive power conference fields, while his own conference has been practicing the same shift in scheduling over the past decade or so. If he had his perfect schedule, he'd also lean towards power conference bias. Heck, Georgetown played at GW to start the season. They're playing Florida in some Orange Bowl Classic in December. They were invited to the Basketball Hall of Fame Tip Off and played against USF. They are choosing to participate in the Cayman Islands Classic this weekend - McNeese St., Middle Tennessee, and Murray St. All of this before they get the privilege of playing a loaded A10 conference schedule. Spare me the crocodile tears, GW coach. (This is a much better discussion for the World of College Basketball thread)