kreed5120

Outside of Cheese, who Groce seems to want to utilize as Manu Ginobili type 6th man, Banks is the only one who can consistently knock down an open jumper. He's not going anywhere. In fact, when we get into conference play and the bench shortens, I expect his minutes to go up.

I'd guess between 15k-18k.

The defensive unit as a whole did enough to win last night, but we still gave up 237 yards on the ground and 4.6 ypc. The defensive front 7 certainly is going to need to improve a ton this offseason. When you consider the fact we haven't had a pass rush all season, I don't feel our secondary has been that bad in coverage. Teams just run over us week after week.

The emphasis should certainly be on getting ready to play players, but we will have the full allotment of 25 scholarships. I wouldn't automatically disqualify recruiting a few true freshman because they couldn't help us year 1. The focus needs to be on stopping the bleeding while building for the future. Bowden always seemed to be focused on the present and scrambled every "free agency", as he referred to it, to fill holes. He kept trying to treat the symptoms instead of curing the real problem. When said player went down there would be a significant drop off in talent from the next man up as we had depth no where. You build depth by recruiting freshmen well as they might have to sit 1 year, but you then get 4 years of playing out of them. There is a finite number of scholarships that you can offer per year (25). If you spend all 25 of those on 3rd to 5th year players, it's mathematically impossible to hit, or even come close to hitting, the 85 scholarship cap.

I for whatever reason watched the first 15 minutes of the second half. YSU looked like the marginally more talented team, but NCC seemed to play with much more effort. Kudos to NCC coach in being able to motivate his players to play with lots of effort on a nightly basis. It can't be an easy task to do when you spend the entire OOC on a bus traveling city to city to pad other teams win totals.

Maybe you should layoff the cheesesteak.

Not going to happen. Might as well start prepping for the "perfect season" parade.

Will we be joining the MAC in the near future?

Tuesday, Saturdays will be the standard play once conference play begins. OOC play is always like this. USC Upstate has another game tomorrow @ Lousville. They weren't going to play us tonight then jump on a bus, drive ~6-7 hours then play Louisville the next day. Besides we play YSU Thursday so Monday worked best for us too.

Tribble showed some nice finishing moves in garbage time. It certainly offers some promise for this season and the future, but he was a non-factor offensively in the prior three games. I'm interested to see if this was the spark of confidence that he needed to become a more assertive scoring option off the bench.

Honestly, can we keep these "Arth sucks, we shouldn't have fired Bowden" posts to one single mega thread instead of having a new one every week?

If X can get his shooting percentages back to where they were his 2nd season at Dayton, he should be a shoe-in for 1st team All-MAC. I find it a bit concerning he's shooting .317 from the field given the low level competition we've been facing.

The jump shooting isn't a head scratcher whatsoever. Last season Akron attempted the 12th most 3's per game out of 351 teams. It's clearly a focal part of Groce's offense and he's clearly recruiting guys who are trigger happy. I honestly don't mind being a 3-point shooting heavy team as I feel with the shorter line in the college game it's a bit overpowering and a great equalizer for lessor talented teams. If we want to be that team we just need to get guys who can actually shoot.

Outside of shooting free throws extremely well there were very few positives to take out of this game.

Would have liked to have seen Akron use their size and athleticism to try to get to the basket more instead of settling for so many 3's. We had them in the double bonus so it would have been nice to take advantage.

Just saw Zips press release indicating both have signed their NLI.

I know the NCAA has a 25 player cap on recruiting classes. Do Juco and transfers factor into that number?

We're currently 8th in the MAC, which is certainly better than what Bowden's classes were rated, however, 8th best still isn't something to be excited over. Also, those ratings are highly subjective so we really won't know how good these guys are for another 3 years. By then Arth might not even be the coach if he can't find ways to win games in the interim.

So they can squeeze a few more .500 P5 teams in? Unlike college football where half the teams are eliminated from competing for a national title before the season even begins, every team in college basketball actually has a path to a national title. Besides it was only 1 1/2 years ago that a 16 seed knocked off a 1.

If you actually go look at @ZipsVoice old post and follow the thread, you will see that I agree with a lot of what you're saying. I particularly pointed out all the guys on the Toledo roster who could be key contributors for us. Bowden's staff actually had a fairly good amount of success in recruiting Florida and Arth's staff, while still early, seems to have a nice inroads to Georgia as I'm counting 4 3* players from that state committed to the 2020 class. It's not realistic to have 100 players on the roster all from Ohio so it's important to still have some pipelines elsewhere. The ~35 players IMO is a pretty good overall number to shoot for. The focus just needs to be on making those a quality 35 instead of a quantity 35.

Someone else on this board counted up the number of NEO players on each MAC teams roster. Akron actually has the most. This hasn't led to increased attendance and has led to our 0-10 record. The problem is we've been recruiting Ohio players who for the most part aren't FBS caliber talent. We need better players regardless if they are from Ohio, PA, Georgia, Florida etc. Did any of the players Bowden recruited from Akron East produce?

Akron flies recruiters out to to Georgia or Florida to pitch high schoolers to join the program. Do you really think a 15 mile drive is going to deter members of the football staff from getting a glimpse of this game?

The RPO offense has kind of only recently made its way into the NFL. No teams were running it 10+ years ago except for the rare game here or there. It has been in the college game for decades so I'm surprised he wasn't aware of it from then, especially since now he is a commentator. Nebraska won multiple national championships utilizing it.

NC Central "tournament success" is by being the tallest midget in the MEAC. They went 5-9 last year during OOC play last year with 3 of those 5 wins being against non-D1 teams. If they were in the MAC last season, they may have finished just ahead of WMU in the battle for last place. Akron by 15.