kreed5120

The punishment was fair and just. We did it to ourselves.

In regards to the Cheese suspension I suppose we just have to make the best of the situation. We've talked all season how we needed at least one of Tribble, Dawson, or Ali to step up. With Cheese out they will have an opportunity.

I don't think it's a regression to the mean for Xeyrius. It may have started out that way, but I feel it has grown into being a mental problem. One of the three pointers he shot last game he was open and double pumped the shot. This tells me he was doubting taking the shot in the first place. Other attempts he missed pretty badly. I'd love to see him start off against Buffalo attacking the basket. Perhaps even get to the free throw line. Seeing the ball go through the net a few times could do wonders for his confidence. Maybe then he'll start shooting again with confidence.

15-0

The MAC released the football schedules for all teams. I suppose the plus side of being terrible is that ESPN doesn't want you for their mid-week TV games. 11 of our 12 games are going to be on Saturday this year. The only one not is @ Ohio on November 27th.

Liberty isn't getting an at-large. 19 of their 24 wins are Q4 wins and they have a Q4 loss. Personally, I'd prefer seeing an at-large team like Liberty or SFA get its chance, however, the committee would take the 11th place team out of the B1G over either. I'd give SFA a better chance than Liberty as they at least have one game that passes the committees who did you beat (Duke) test.

I'd like to see more Sayles in this game. Mballa was just purely more physical than Reece and more athletic than Riak. Sayles is a much better balance between the two. Another thing is our guards need to do a better job of keeping their man in front of them. A large part of that rebounding discrepancy was from our guards getting beat then Riak or Reece having to rotate instead of being able to box out for a rebound.

Having postseason basketball beats not having it. I highly doubt this team participates in the CIT or CBI this season. Not to mention there is at least intrigue in Akron playing a team like Cincy (if they miss the NCAAT field).

The Zips not named LCJ scored a combined 25. That's not a whole lot of points to go around for the other starter/bench players. We pretty much always need 3 of LCJ/Cheese/Banks/Xeyrius to score well to win. Really LCJ was the only one that put up decent shooting numbers and even his were below his season averages.

His only real challenger for the award is Justin Turner and now Turner's team sits in 1st so right or wrong it's still going to hurt him some.

We should actually be cheering for CMU to win out. After the head-to-head tie-breaker, the next tie-breaker is record vs ranked MAC team. Meaning for example Buffalo finishes #3 and both BG & Akron went 1-1 they would move to the 4th team. If that 4th team is CMU, which we beat and BG lost to, we'd win head-to-head tie-breaker.

Easily the worst we've played start to finish all season. We peaked in early January. We have only a couple weeks to rediscover ourselves.

We're playing great defense this 2nd half. We need to start hitting shots.

Xeyrius now double clutching on 3 point attempts. Burn this game tape.

The poor shooting is obviously impacting our guys mentally and effort on the defensive end. I actually thought we played good defensively the first 15 minutes. Those last 5 minutes were brutal.

This camera crew sucks as bad as the Zips have been shooting.

We're not getting anything out of our starters besides LCJ.

We really lost our composure these last 5 minutes.

Last time these teams faced off Akron had a pretty terrible offensive first half. Groce told the Zips at halftime to attack the hoop as BG was conceding the driving lanes in order to run the Zips off the 3-point line/ball pressure LCJ. It will be interesting to see if Huger takes that same approach this game since the Zips kind of figured it out last game. I'm going to guess he'll come out with a different plan.

I don't think his Duquesne team is as good as Akron this year, but I'd say it's better than BG or Buffalo. What we're seeing here is a #2-#3 team in the MAC translates to being the #5 or #6 team in the A10. He isn't going to win the A10 with MAC level talent nor is he going to build a resume to get an at-large with it. He certainly needed the TDM, Hughes, and Weathers type players to get Duquesne back to respectability that way he'd have a chance of landing some better players. It's still to be seen whether or not he ends up getting them.

Frankly I'm just not going to watch youtube videos of some random high school kid who might not even attend Akron. Based off the qualifications that you listed and his 1/2 dozen D1 offers, he seems like he would be a solid get and I can see why Groce offered him. If he commits I'll actually take a look and offer an opinion on the impact I feel he can make. In the meantime I still appreciate hearing updates in case he does commit.

I'm probably more confident in this game than I should be. I just don't think BG is as good as their record indicates. As I mentioned earlier, they are 7-0 in MAC games decided by 3 points or less. I'm going to go Akron by 5.

Kind of surprised to hear the line shifted 2.5 points in such a short amount of time

First Team LCJ Turner German Teague Jayvon Graves Second Team Cheese M. Jackson Preston Flowers McKay/Pippen/Willie Jackson

It just becomes really tough to beat the Boeheim zone when you can't knock down your open 3s. In years past we have had some decent quality bigs, like Big Dog, that we could post up at the top of the key and have him pick the defense apart. We just really don't have that player this year.