kreed5120

@DannyHoke I'm not trying to cherry pick as a lot of what you're saying I agree with. I still wanted to clear up a few things. 2) I went and looked at articles for this previously. I think his contract expires in spring of 2022 unless he got another extension that I'm not aware of. 3) Each MAC school gets something in the neighborhood of a million dollars from ESPN. I'm sure you will hear exposure and other things tossed out, but it's 100% because of money that they do it. Akron doesn't pick the days it plays the games. That's pushed down from the MAC who makes the schedule. 5) I'd say men's soccer, women's basketball, and men's basketball really aren't inflated. Some people may not use their season tickets on certain nights, but those numbers do reflect legitimate ticket sales. Normally sometime in the spring the ABJ publishes an article on how many tickets the University buys to meet quotas. Not much of a surprise, but it's a large sum.

We were out rebounded 24-12 in the 1st half. We actually held our own in the second half as we finished -12 for the game. Riak and Xeyrius did well in boxing out and getting boards. This is probably the one opponent we'll face all season that will be able to exploit Reece size.

The 16 point half-time deficit was just a little too much to overcome. It's kind of hard to fault Xeyrius for taking those 3's. Those were all good looks within the flow of the offense. He was brought here to be a stretch 4 so those shots are well within his game. He's shown at Dayton he can make them. It has to be a mental thing at this point.

Have to like the effort Zips are playing with. Trimmed the 22 point deficit to 10 before that made 3. Banks and Cheese are both playing pretty great.

Louisville has 24 rebounds to our 12. We need to do a better job of boxing out in the 2nd half.

I agree single game tickets are overpriced. Saying that if cost was the only thing stopping people from attending, the student section would be packed on a nightly basis.

We certainly have some nice pieces this season. I feel Xeyrius is a huge wild card for us. If he continues to shoot 24% from 3 and 31% from the field, we're probably the 4th-5th best team in the MAC. If he could get those efficiency numbers back to his year 2 Dayton numbers, we're right there competing at the top of the MAC.

He also stated on the ESPN+ broadcast that he is confident in starting any of his top 8 guys, which shows he doesn't have the same level of confidence in Sayles that he has in the other 8 rotational players. Outside of SCUS he's only been getting 2-5 minutes per game. I kind of expect that to continue. He might get a game here or there where he gets 10-15 minutes if one of the bigs miss a game or gets into early foul trouble. Sayles I felt has always had some good footwork and post moves. He just seems to lack that touch. I wonder how much having back-to-back season ending injuries impacted his growth.

ABJ should hire you to write the game previews. You do a better job than George. Akron, Louisville, NCC, YSU, and SCU are all competing in some made up round robin tournament so they will all end up playing one another once.

Looks like we had the same thoughts ?

I'd say that was our best half of basketball so far this season.

That chase down block though...

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.