kreed5120

I don't disagree with that. There are just some that feel the need to resurrect this thread whenever Duquesne goes on a losing streak or gets eliminated from their conference tournament. Really there are two times that this thread should be resurrected. Once when he officially retires. Another when Akron hangs his name from the rafters.

I don't get the need to s*** on Dambrot. This thread doesn't have to be a Dambrot vs Groce thread. One can appreciate the foundation Dambrot built for the program while also enjoying what Groce is achieving. After all, without Dambrot showing that Akron could be a winning program, Groce probably doesn't risk his reputation as a coach to come here.

Duquesne really ramped up spending on the basketball side. They paid Dambrot significantly more than their previous coach. They gutted their arena and pretty much replaced everything new. I have to imagine their plan was to be a top 3-5 team in the A10 with 1-2 tourney appearances by now. I wouldn't say his tenure has been a complete disaster, but I have to imagine it has fallen short of what they expected.

My undergrad was during the Coach I years. It's literally impossible to get any of my friends to the games. Every year my friend group will go to the alumni tailgate for homecoming, but instead of making the short walk from lot 9 to inside the stadium at kickoff, they would rather just go to Euro Gyro to reminisce. That's what ~20 years of being a perennial 0-5 win team does to a fan base. You have a whole generation of alumni who are indifferent to Zips football. I can get many of these same friends to go to Zips basketball games or to the MAC tournament in Cleveland. Zips football likely needs to consistently win 8-10 games per year to make people interested.

Back when we were playing CSU and YSU in rotating years as part of that coaches vs cancer, those programs were cupcakes. YSU, excluding this year, pretty much has always been terrible. CSU goes through periods of being decent, but historically is normally middle of the road to bad. I much prefer our annual match-up with Marshall as they're consistently pretty solid. However, with the MAC-Sun Belt challenge starting that annual game might be going away so maybe we replace them with a CSU. I really have no desire to play both YSU and CSU annually unless both prove to be consistently competitive. We play enough cupcakes as is.

I admittedly don't follow the women's program. It probably has been 15 years since I last attended a game. That said, if Guthrie didn't care about the women's program, he could have just easily extended Coach Jackson for the similar salary she was making. In MAC men's basketball you see other schools do exactly this. CMU gave Keno Davis 8 years. NIU gave Montgomery 10 years. EMU gave Rob Murphy 10 years. All these coaches spent the bulk of their tenure being in the bottom half of the conference. Outside of the 1 year CMU did make the MAC final, none of these coaches ever really seriously contended in the MAC. If that's the level of "success" people are content with then women's hoops will continue drawing only a few hundred fans per game.

It's because scandals and gossip generate clicks, not feel good stories. This is why so much media has turned into TMZ instead of actual reporting.

This zone defense clearly isn't working. How about let's get back to the man we were playing

This is my philosophy as well. Coach K is a great regular season coach, but in his 21 years as a head coach, he has never taken his team to the NCAA tournament. He's the Frank Solich of MAC basketball. Consistently good in the regular season, but fails to get the job done when it matters.

They do it this way because the 4-5 game winner has to play the 1 seed in the 2nd round. If you gave the 4-5 seed the late game then asked them to play the first game the next day, that would mean they're playing the 1 seed on ~19 hours of rest, meanwhile, the 1 seed would be on ~28 hours. That's too big of an advantage.

In this case the reason we have 5 home games is because we did a 2 for 1 with Kentucky. This deal was always going to make it so one year we'd have 1 home OOC game to 3 road games. The only way we could have fixed it would be to buy 2 FCS, which would be pointless since only 1 of those would count towards bowl eligibility. In the grand scheme I can live with this Larry Williams as I'm looking forward to Kentucky coming to Infocision in 2024. There are plenty of other things we can burn him at the stake for...

To the ones complaining about our weight room not being adequate, I'd love to hear what free weights, machines, equipment we're missing that our peers have. What makes a Toledo or Western Michigan weight room better than ours?

I see that now. I should have looked at a calendar before commenting

Probably about as favorable of a schedule that we could hope for. We don't have to play Toledo, no midweek home games, and we get a home game against a rebuilding Kent. I still think making it to 6 wins will be challenging, but it's not out of the realm of possibility.

I'm not sure if it's a matter of effort or teams have learned how to attack the Zips defense, but we've regressed considerably on that end of the floor. We're giving away too many open looks. Edit: We use to have an identity of being a tough, gritty defense. Now we don't have much of an identity.

Personally, I'd rather Toledo just stay the one seed as I'd like to avoid having to face Toledo as long as possible. Perhaps hope someone like Ball State upsets them in the semis

I was more defending your point. It should either go to coach K (assuming Toledo wins the regular season MAC title) or Michael Lewis. There shouldn't really be any other competition.

The bottom half of the MAC is a dumpster fire. Some team in that group has to be the best of the rest.

I also just don't think we could put a lineup that matches up well with them. Toledo actually has two competent offensive bigs so asking one of our 6'2 guards to guard one of them is asking a lot. They also got 3 point range, which forces Freeman away from the basket. Frankly, I want Toledo on the other side of the bracket. I like our chances against Kent or Ball State. We just don't match up against Toledo well. Hopefully someone can upset them so we can avoid them.

Was that our first made 3?

Those are from their women's team. Their women have made the tournament 8x since the last time the men's team qualified...

One year I remember we got our teeth kicked in during a tournament game against Buffalo. It was either year 1 or 2 of Groce.

Toledo both games have made both X and Freeman work for their points. They're daring anyone else to beat them.

Too athletic for Sammy, too much size for our 4 guard lineup. They just seem like a bad matchup for us. This is really a game that could use a Dawson or Ali for.

IMO the key to this game is about Akron setting the tone and dictating pace. For the first 10-15 minutes of the last game against Toledo it looked like it was going to be a ~65-60 game, which is the style of game Akron needs to beat Toledo. If it turns into another up and down court style of play where the first to 80 wins, that plays into Toledo's favor.