kreed5120

How YSU got a top 4 seed, but Toledo didn't is beyond me. By every measureable Toledo was ahead of YSU. Michigan deserves the 2 seed they got as they were literally a bubble team. It should be OSU playing @ Toledo & YSU @ Michigan.

The NIT only seeds the top 4 seeds in each region. They assign opponents by proximity to keep costs low. That's why Toledo was assigned to play Michigan.

I'd be interested in a 2 or 4 game series between Akron & Duquesne, not a meaningless end of season exhibition game. The schools are less than 2 hours apart so travel would be cheap, and they are the caliber of a top half MAC school so it would be a decent test to prepare us for MAC play. Similar to what Marshall has provided us over the last 8 years or so.

I really wish they would just expand the NIT to 64 teams, like how the women's is set up, then eliminate these third rate tournaments.

Boals is a good coach. I'd expect OU to be a contender most years. They were just rebuilding this year.

The real solution is I think we need to transfer someone in for the position, like we did with Castaneda. Handing the keys to the offense over to someone Groce pretty much benched the second half of the year for his poor decision making would seem like a recipe for disaster. That's not to say Tavari couldn't win the position mid-season. I think he had a really high ceiling. He just seems really raw and I'd prefer him more as a 2 guard at this stage of his career.

Anyone who thinks we don't need more bigs clearly forgets the games against Toledo where we asked 6'2 guards to guard 1st Team All-MAC Shumate. Theoretically on paper we have guys with size, but that doesn't matter if they aren't good enough to see the court for meaningful minutes. Dawson should help some as he can play the 3 or 4, but we need to add someone else to the rotation that is >6'5 who can give us ~15 productive minutes a night.

Is he though? It seemed Clarke passed him in the rotation once he returned healthy. Tavari has been a bit careless with the ball. He's a better scorer, but Clarke seems like the better facilitator on offense. The thing with Clarke is you need him surrounded by capable shooters as he's never going to be a guy who can take over the game offensively. He's also a vastly better on ball defender. Edit: I do think Tavari has the higher ceiling, but the game just seems a little fast for him still. He needs to improve his in game decision making.

We're in it because we've actually played pretty good defense in the half court. Our miscues offensively combined with Kent capitalizing on them is why we're trailing.

We look lost offensively. Everyone is pressing, settling for bad shots, and turning it over.

I've only ever gone to the MAC Championship game and have always just bought my tickets online using one of the codes. Never really paid attention to "our section". In my experience it felt like the whole arena was the Zips section as most people just buy tickets wherever and the majority tend to be Zips fans.

Have we even participated in one of those 3rd rate tournaments since Groce has been here? I think it's NCAAT or nothing.

Carry literally had his best game of the season against us. For most of the season he's been a volume shooter, not an efficient one. For the season he's shooting .304 for 3 and .409 from the field. To put that into comparison Sammy Hunter is shooting .322 from 3 and .406 from the field. Shooting wise I feel we caught Carry on the wrong night. That's not to say Carry isn't incapable of getting hot. Hunter had a massive game then too. Sometime players just get into the zone. Carry seemed to really disrupt Castaneda flow. Even in the first game I felt Carry played some good defense on him, but Castaneda was able to make some difficult shots. I feel to win this game we need Castaneda to get hot, Freeman to stay out of foul trouble, and either Hankerson or Hunter to step up and deliver a ~15 point game. First one to 70 wins this game IMO.

Let's save some points for tomorrow.

I'm a huge fan of Whitesell and what he's doing at Buffalo. They should give him a lifetime contract.

It looked like he was trying to draw a charge, but Powell just went around him. His positioning wasn't good.

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.