kreed5120

The UMass poster (Steve) who occasionally drops in here mentioned that the UMass collective has different tiers and that entry starts as low as $10/mo. If Akron had something like that, I wouldn't be opposed to contributing. Obviously it doesn't amount to much unless you have several very large donors or thousands of small ones.

It's a fairly common theme for the more talented team to pull away in the 2nd half. As @Captain Kangaroo put it, Creighton was the better team at all 5 positions. It would have taken them playing one of their worst games all season and us playing our best to spring an upset. Neither of those two happened.

I think he'll be long gone before Akron get a new arena. I might be as well.

And even they are losing Hunter to graduation. The MAC is beginning to look like a 14 or 15 seed next year.

Just when you think the MAC can't possibly get any worse...

Yes, someone shared an article from one of the Massachusetts publications interviewing the UMass athletic director. Apparently UMass has a collective specifically for basketball. The athletic director mentioned few to no other MAC programs have one and that it should give them a competitive edge. Apparently the collective pays out $500k/yr. I can easily see them becoming the MAC team that poaches players like Cochran from other MAC teams.

What benefited Duquesne was there were a lot of upsets in the conference tournaments therefore the 11 & 12 seed line was weaker than it normally is. Like for example, Indiana State would have easily been seeded ahead of them had they won the MVC, but they didn't. In a normal year they would have been a low end 12/upper end 13 seed.

I don't think anyone is being overly critical. They're just acknowledging that Groce went all in with this team and now we have no pieces to really build around for next year. I don't have a problem that Groce went all in, but at the same time I'm not eagerly looking forward to next year. Edit: that's not to say we can't compete in the future.

Overall, I can't complain about the effort. I just don't think this team ever really neared its potential this season. Shooting woes plagued us the 2nd half of the season and we really had no way of defending #11 on Creighton. I'd recommend trying to send a double to force him out of his dribble, but they just shoot the 3 too well to do that.

Exactly this. It's not like we have NIL money to buy a new team. What 4th or 5th year senior that has aspirations to play in the tournament is going to want to come to an Akron team devoid of talent? Groce is going to have to find some diamonds in the rough.

Finally getting stops but it might be a little too late.

Good defense by Hunter there not getting backed down.

It will take a miracle for us to get back into this.

Pointless foul by Ali

Game will get out of hand soon if we can't respond with a run of our own. I don't really know what adjustments we can do other than hope they start missing and we can score in transition.

We really needed to get a 2nd on him in the first half. It's going to be hard getting him into foul trouble now. Especially considering the refs seem to not want to call fouls on Creighton.

I felt we made some mistakes late as we were pressing. During that 8-0 run Tribble tried to go after an offensive rebound he had no chance of getting, which led to a transition 3. Ali picking up a 2nd foul when he should have just got back on defense. We must keep our composure and play smart.

I don't think Akron really wants to get into a first to 90 game with Creighton. We need to do something to disrupt their offense.

Seeing how cheap tickets have gotten makes me regret even more that I couldn't get off work.

I believe they recently transitioned to D1. Within the last year or two.

I'm not looking forward to picking power forward. Freeman, Kwan, Romeo Travis, Tree. I might be missing one or two.

Fun for the whole family

Freeman made honorable me mention AP All-American. Also, of note, former OU stand out Mark Sears made 2nd team All-American https://www.instagram.com/p/C4tlczBOHeO/?igsh=bGFjbm13cjBjdnZj

When your athletic department supports FBS, football is what drives realignment. It's why UMass moved to the MAC. All these examples of sustained success are of teams moving to a better conference. Where is Akron going to go? If we were still FCS football, I'm sure the MVC would have called a decade ago. But we do have football and given it's poor state, it makes us one of the least attractive expansion candidates in the MAC.

The committee has always looked at who you best and where you best them when selecting teams. The intention of the NET was to grade wins and losses, not to seed teams. Indiana St went 1-4 in Q1 games. That's why the committee left them out. All that said, I do believe they should have made the tournament, but it's pretty consistent to how the committee has always picked teams.