kreed5120

I'm kind of surprised we're only 11 point dogs given the spreads of our last few games. I would have thought Buffalo was better than BG, Miami, OU but then again I really haven't followed the MAC this closely this year.

At the end of the day Terry Bowden was here for 7 seasons and only finished 1 year with a winning record. If that's what Akron's ceiling is as a football program I'd rather they just schedule OSU, Alabama, Clemson, and Oklahoma every year for the paycheck and punt on the football program entirely to focus on basketball. 5-7 football doesn't excite me and given how empty Inforcision was when Terry was here I'd say I'm not in the minority. Arth has been an utter failure, but I'd rather try for success (even if it means failing) than to settle for a below average (35-52 overall and 23-33 conference) head coach.

I feel Arth has to make it to 4 wins this season to justify giving him a 4th season and even then he would be entering season 4 on the hot seat. I'm not sure he can make it to 4 wins without a win at Miami.

Akron playing a game in Canton isn't going to attract fans. Any visiting fan can make the 20 min drive south on 77, which many do. I think it was Toledo that had a home and home with OSU with the Toledo home game being played at Cleveland Browns Stadium. Now that I would find worthwhile.

The number I believe Larry Williams stated previously was $10 million. 4.5 million of which was the cost of the stadium. That means the football program costs ~5.5 million on an operational standpoint. In addition to the 3.6 million we received in guarantees, we receive another 800k as part of our TV deal. We receive another million or so from the CFP distribution. Add in ticket, parking, sponsorship, etc. and football makes enough to cover itself on the operations side. It bleeds money on the stadium, but we are stuck paying that regardless.

None of those names Akron could afford outside of maybe Deion. Freeman is reportedly making 1.6 million this year. Why would he take a $1 million pay cut to take a bottom 10 FBS job? Clark Lea is head coach at Vanderbilt and is making I'm guessing $3 million.

I definitely feel there is a lot of talent in the midwest that gets missed. It's a big reason why I feel the MVFC is perennially the best FCS conference as so many FBS players slip through the cracks and find there way onto teams like North Dakota. States like Illinois might not produce a ton of blue chip 4 & 5 star recruits, but they have a ton of G5 talent that gets missed as teams focus so much on Texas, Florida, Ohio, etc.

If Akron was to cut the football program the time to have done it was before Infocision was built. I've ran the numbers many times here and don't fill like digging up those old posts, but between the guarantee games, MAC tv money, sponsorships, CFP money allocation, etc. the football program pretty much pays for itself on an operational standpoint. That said, I still find it absurd a 1-11 FBS coach still commands a 600k salary.

If the best we could have got last go around was Arth when the program was still bad, but not very bottom of FBS, I can't imagine the pool of candidates that we will have this time. Given our budget constraints and this being a pretty dead end job I think the best we could realistically hope for is a OC or DC from a good MAC/C-USA type team and hope we hit lightning in a bottle.

Really have been out of the loop. Just looked at the tournament we're in and I'm pretty disappointed. Those are the type of teams we could be scheduling outside of tournaments. I really prefer tournaments that give us a chance to pick up quality wins on a neutral court. It's really challenging to beat Louisville, OSU, West Virginia's of the world when you have to play them at their home court.

Hindsight is 20/20, but it was a mistake leaving Irons in the game vs OSU as long as we did. He was getting hit on damn near every drop back. If he did suffer a concussion, as some are saying, it's not really a surprise.

This defense is pretty horrendous.

Ohio lost to Duquesne

I feel his record at UTEP is more relevant. He doesn't have to worry about playing Florida or Kentucky in the MAC.

That's true, but it only works if you're able to retain the players otherwise you're just a minor league system for a bigger school.

I'd honestly be surprised to see Groce here in 5 years and that's not necessarily a bad thing. If he keeps doing what he's been doing, he's going to get noticed

Any publicity is good publicity, right?

But there are also no auto-bids. Auto-bids for conferences like the MEAC usually take up the last 10 seeds of the bracket.

Fortunately for us Buffalo is bad at free throws if we need to foul

I'm puzzled how Preston made 1st team. Not because of his talent, but because he only played in 9 MAC games. He didn't even play enough games to qualify for MAC stat leaders. Your best ability is your availability.

It's going to be important for Trimble to find his shot again. I'm not feeling as good about our chances as I was a month ago, but we still have the best player in the MAC so we will have a fighters chance no matter who we face.

I'm kind of surprised to see both EMU and NIU make coaching changes during the pandemic. Neither program has invested much into their basketball programs in a long while so one would think they would try to keep costs down.

It seems teams have figured out how to attack our defense. When we were playing our best basketball, we had the #1 defense in the MAC. The defense has really faded over the last month or so. We were still able to squeeze out some narrow victories early when our defense first regressed, but now those narrow victories have turned into losses. We still have the best player in the MAC so we certainly have a fighters chance in Cleveland. The offense has just been too inconsistent to make me to think we can rely solely on it to win 3 straight games. We need to get back to playing defense like we were in January.

My memory appears to be failing me. I'm not sure why I thought he didn't play that game

We got to play OU twice without Preston. I'd say the scheduling was very fortunate to us. We just failed to capitalize.