kreed5120

I hear the soon to be crowned world champs New York Knicks will be sending 3 scouts to each of his games.

That definitely was an issue and likely why he completely fell out of the rotation. I do think the speed of the American game, especially the pace Akron wanted to play, was too much of an adjustment for him. Not because he wasn't athletic enough, but because he lacked the ability to make the right basketball play in split second decision making. D1 college basketball, even at the MAC level, is a higher level of competition than you see at many of these 2nd or 3rd tier overseas leagues.

Average seems like a generous term. I think people got too invested in the offseason hype. It never translated.

Water finding it's level...

Well, she's actually a Redhawk alumni. Nobody is perfect.

Thank you!

I saw this event shared yesterday. I'll unfortunately have to sit it out this year as I'm getting married on 9/19. I hope to participate in future years and am looking forward to hearing how it goes.

College basketball guarantees pay peanuts compared to football. Not that I'm in disagreement on playing more games at high majors. I think it would better prepare us for March. I'm more pointing out how it's not as lucrative as you might think it is financially. Someone on Miami's board shared a link to a large number of their game contracts. In football you get $1M-$1.3M per game. In basketball a program like OSU pays Miami $90K-$100K, which sounds like a lot. Miami was paying low major programs (UMass Lowell, Maine, etc.) Miami was paying $60K-$70K. High majors don't really pay that much more than mid-majors do. A difference of maybe $30K/game. We would probably only get $20K playing @ Kansas than we would against a Nevada, UNLV type program. That's not the case in football. The non-D1 schools can be scheduled very cheap. I saw Miami paid some school I never heard of $4,500 for a game. That explains why you see so many of those type of opponents on poverty struck programs, like the directional Michigan's, schedules.

I would say the one restricting item is it's in NCAAs basketball interest to keep March Madness in the calendar spot that it is currently. They fill a clear void in the sports calendar. Pushing it later would start making it interfere with other sports, like the Masters, start of MLB season, NHL/NBA playoffs. That would hurt ratings and diminish their cash cow. I do think there is room to add another 7-10 games though. Usually 1-2 times a year there are stretches where the Zips don't play for 7-10 days. They can also play in a 3rd game a few weeks.

The problem with the double bye is why have a tournament if 7 out of the 8 teams that make the tournament final over a 4 year period are the 1 & 2 seeds? The one that wasn't was the 3 seed. If the tournament becomes too predictable why would anyone care to watch unless you're a fan of one of those top 1-2 teams? Like I said before I'm against the idea of a double bye as it strips the MAC Tournament of the one thing that makes it exciting. I'm not opposed to entertaining options, like a 6 team tournament or re-seeding between rounds, that meets somewhere in the middle. Simply having a chalk tournament yearly defeats the purpose and that's what the double bye produced more often than not.

I'm fine with the MACT the way it is now. It's one of the best mid-major tournaments in all of college basketball. I do think a double bye takes away much of the intrigue by making the top 2 seeds over powered. I would entertain the idea of re-seeding teams each round and would at least listen to the argument of a 6 team tournament with top 2 seeds getting a first round bye.

A big reason why they went away from the double bye was because schools thought it was too over powered and used it as an excuse for why Akron constantly made the finals under Dambrot. Now that both Toledo and Miami got embarrassed by an early upset a few years apart and Akron is dominating even more so than before they want to make changes once again. It seems the other ADs are just tired of Akron winning.

None of the schools they compete with seem to have very strong football programs. It says a lot that instead of trying to elevate their level to compete with Louisville, they decided to form an entirely new league just to avoid playing them. Louisville is a solid program, but it’s not like they’re Massillon or Hoban. Feels like a loser mentality.

It's surprising how consistently bad women's basketball has been. They have access to the same training facility and analytical tools men's basketball has. I know they don't have the same NIL that the men's program has, but none of the MAC women's programs are spending big dollars on NIL.

It's probably part of their business strategy. The thought process is drops drive demand as it creates artificial scarcity and FOMO. Not to mention it reduces expenses by eliminating the amount of inventory those websites need to keep on hand. It's actually growing more common in e-commerce.