kreed5120

Our NET ranking is #143. We won't even be in the discussion for an NIT bid.

Ball State should be so much better than they are. There is so much high school basketball talent that comes out of Indiana and Ball State still has a pretty decent basketball fan base despite being pretty mediocre under Whitford. The right guy could easily make them competitive.

My guess is Buffalo gets a put back off of a miss

Castaneda has disappeared in the second half. We will need him down the stretch.

CMU up 71-70 EDIT: 20 seconds left, but Toledo has the ball

I hate it when I have to agree with @dre22era

Given how far the MAC has fallen that would be the OVC or Summit based off the numbers @RowdyZip presented. That's still going to be a lot of garbage opponents.

They're only playing the East teams 2-3 more times. The West teams have just decided to quit funding their basketball programs. Bates was making like 120k before he was fired. That's about half the amount of money Horizon league teams pay their coaches. You get what you pay for. Edit: The MAC West teams use to be good enough that they could pad their win totals beating cupcakes OOC. Now those teams are the cupcakes.

How much the MAC has fallen is insane. The 2-3 years prior to covid the MAC was hovering around 10-12 range. Now over half the league is those same cupcakes that we complained about scheduling for home OOC games...

I would think Jacobs or Freeman is DPOY. Freeman is 2nd in the MAC in blocks and 1st in rebounds.

Some people just like to look for things to complain about. I only made it to a couple games this year. I had to wear a mask all of maybe 2 minutes each game I attended. Not really worth complaining about

While I do agree people like to complain and don't want to offer real solutions, I do feel there have been some ideas that have been presented in the past. For example, people have been saying for years that the JAR should sell alcohol. Why did Akron have to wait until a pandemic wiped out 30%-40%, maybe more, of season ticket holders to make that small change? I do agree there is no simple solutions. If there was then other schools like Bowling Green, Kent, Miami (OH) would have found it. One can argue Akrons leadership has been incompetent, but literally all Midwestern non-big 10 schools are struggling so it's not just an Akron problem.

Nah, I'm glad we were able to get LCJ instead.

If we look at kenpom (as it shows previous years rankings) Toledo is #87 and Ohio is #106. Last season the top 3 MAC teams were #74, #77, and #81. That means last year the MAC had 3 teams better than this years Toledo team. I'd say the MAC is down a crossed the board, top to bottom. Edit: you have to go back to 2017 to find a year that the MAC top ranked team was ranked worse than what Toledo is currently.

No, the MAC went to a 20 game conference schedule. We sacrificed 2 OOC games to do it. That's why you see MAC games in December whereas before MAC didn't start play until January.

Did you see how bad we looked in Florida with Walton? I think we would even be worse with him. Teams would be able to freely double team Freeman anytime he received a pass in the low post and would be able to pack the paint to cutoff any dribble penetration. Walton makes Tribble look like an elite 3 point shooter. Someone like Carry who could help space the floor and create offense for others certainly would have helped.

You see former players and media personnel land announcing gigs all the time. It was nice having an official to breakdown the calls made and provide a different insight to the game that you just don't see elsewhere.

When you factor in how bad the MAC is this year, this might be Akron's worst team in the last 20 years (excluding Groce year 0 rebuild). Outside of Freeman I don't see anyone fighting all that hard for rebounds or loose balls on a consistent basis. Ali is probably the only elite 3 point shooter on the team for an offense that heavily relies on the 3 and even then he's only putting up 3 attempts per game. Akron was playing some really great defense earlier in the season, but that has appeared to regress quite considerably. This team is just too flawed and doesn't have that one player who can put the team on his back to mask those flaws.

It was old school throw it in the post and let the offense run through the big type offense. I can see how someone in today's day and age could view it as boring as they want to see guard dominated offenses, but that doesn't mean it wasn't effective. We can agree to disagree.

I'd say as of now big dog, Zeke and Romeo are all ahead of Enrique. Enrique can still add to his resume.

I feel you're sleeping on the Big Dog, Kwan, Robotham, Antino, Ivey team. That teams weakness was their best player was pushing 300lbs so winning 3 games in 3 days was bit of a challenge, but given their size I think they could have picked up a win in the tourney had they made it. Edit: That team beat a Houston team on the road in the NIT that went 12-6 in the AAC

It should have been assumed that game would get flexed. That's the current 2nd place team vs current 3rd place team.

Ohio and Toledo would be bubble teams for an NIT at-large. Neither are or will be remotely in the discussion for an at-large to the big dance.

It's not even the eye test. The MAC is objectively down. Let's go back and look at the 2019-2020 season(last full regular season before covid). The worst team in the MAC that year was WMU and their Kenpom rating was 237. Now looking at this year's Kenpom that would place them better than 5 teams this season. So the worst team in 2020 is better than nearly half the teams this season. You can take any year and it would be about the same.

I can't speak for Rowdy, but my expectation is that I think this Zips team is good enough that they're capable of beating any team in the MAC when they're playing at their best, but not consistent enough to string 3 of those games in a row. His assessment is spot on about Akron looking better than it is because the MAC is down. We have another month of basketball so one just hopes we keep finding ways to improve and that we're playing our best ball in March.