mrelegazna

Still hands-down the toughest loss of my life of sports fandom, especially since Cedrick Middleton is perhaps my alltime favorite Zip.

My favorite part of this is how the thread title about Dambrot referred to him as "Ol' KD" for YEARS until the end, when all of the sudden THAT WAS TOO DISRESPECTFUL! AND WE SHOULDN'T BE MAD AT HIM ANYMORE! and it was changed to just Keith.

In fairness, the MAC website showed #1 vs. #8 as the noon eastern game for weeks now.

But NIU comes through for them! They got all of the elsewhere help they needed, with NIU and WMU both winning as road dogs. Alas, they couldn't help themselves and had their doors blown off from go by a Miami team locked into their seed. It is to laugh.

Note from a hoophead and neutral observer:

St. Francis first ever win over an FCS team. Last week they lost 18-10 to Dayton, who is non-scholarship for football. 😂

As I said elsewhere, no shade to anyone involved in scheduling, I'm sure it's hard, a ton is out of your hands, cancellations happen, and (although this is being debated), I suspect that a lot of teams see little upside to scheduling Akron, and turn us down. But in some respects, I feel like this is the worst OOC I've seen from the Zips in my 35-or-so years of fandom. We didn't get a single P5 school; I wonder when is the last time that happened? I personally really want these games, we've come close against teams like UNC and Louisville (when they were still good) and beaten plenty of P5 also-rans. I think these are good for confidence and visibility. Now, you can argue that in the past we've scheduled a couple P5s but also had too many Chicago States otherwise, and were therefore worse schedules. That's fair. It does seem clear that Groce is prioritizing playing teams "at our level," so to speak. On this front, I think they did an okay-ish job but not as good as last year. No conference basement-dwellers, but also few that really challenged for conference titles last year; only St. Mary's and the two Ivy schools. Like last year at UNLV, we are going out west for ONE game before coming back. Can that be good economically? Can we really not couple that anyone else? Can we not get a home-and-home against anyone out West to give us more bang for our travel buck?

UT maybe, Kent maaaaybe, but surely there are schools the would be happy to play Miami and would not be happy to play us. Also, personally, as I am not in the athletic department office on a daily basis, I am loathe to insinuate anyone involved with Akron scheduling is falling down on the job.

Funny you mention them. Read on. Speaking as a college basketball scheduling nerd in general and early-season tournament nerd in particular, I have some bad news: these school-hosted four-team tournaments never "pave the way" for more legitimate opposition down the road. Omaha, Alabama State, and Lamar are about the level of opposition even when Power 5 schools host them. UTEP's Sun Bowl tournament probably comes closest to bringing in tough foes, and it's not like we had to get through Duke and Kansas to win that. Example 1: Ohio State's tourney will have Evansville, UW-Green Bay and Campbell (granted, a notch better than ours, but only a notch). Example 2: Missouri's tourney will have Arkansas-Pine Bluff, Pacific, and they're still trying to fill the fourth. I don't really understand the point of these, unless it's to give the host a confidence boost and a trophy. Here's my source, which is a great resource: https://www.bloggingthebracket.com/2024/5/13/24140186/2024-25-mens-college-basketball-exempt-multi-team-events-mte-thanksgiving-early-season-tournaments

Huh. Just goes to show you how subjective taste is. I think Vanderbilt's is the most boring and therefore bad of the group. Simple block letters may be sported by some iconic schools but you can't shortcut your way to icon status by copying their logo, and I say again, Vanderbilt's is boring. The Michigan block M is boring. I actually like Western Michigan's...the drawback to having brown as one of your primary colors is obvious, so I admire any team with the guts to do it. Come to think of it, all NE Ohio football fans should understand what I'm saying. I'm neutral on both Akron's and George Mason's. My alltime favorite Akron logo is the A with the kangaroo head.

Now I'm imagining a guy who's bitter because he's cold-called the athletic department offering to be the strength and conditioning coach and was turned down despite his pleas of "but I made lance corporal in the Army!" and "I pretty much tear up Wadsworth crossfit!"

Have Freeman and the other Akron graduating guys actually graduated, and as such, are they able to graduate-transfer anywhere?

It's hard for me not to get into the weeds here with abstract basketball philosophy with this sort of stuff. Outside shooting, I believe, is VERY much a mental game once you've achieved a certain level of shooting competence (for which I would describe pretty much all D1 guards and most frontcourt players as it pertains to outside shooting). You have to have confidence in your stroke. And, I believe, the most difficult time to manifest that confidence is when the other team is on a big run and has all the momentum. So difficult, in fact, I don't think you should be doin' it! So many times this year I've begged the Zips on my TV to stop shooting 3's and jumpers, get it inside by either feeding Enrique or penetrating. I know these guys think they can hit that knockdown three that will stop the bleeding, shut up the other team, and get back on track, just by doing the same thing they do thousands of times in practice and dozens of times in games, but it's not that simple. You have to have some sort of understanding of how momentum swings work, and how to break momentum when it's in the other team's favor. I don't pretend to know how to do that, exactly. I think it has something to do with staying in the moment - there is no yesterday, there is no tomorrow, there is no 2 minutes ago, there is no 2 minutes from now - there is only this shot - but not only is that easier said than done, but how the hell do you immunize yourself as much as possible from the other team's runs while taking advantage of the confidence boosts to your shot that having momentum in your team's favor gets you? Again, I don't know how to solve that puzzle, but a) if the Zips don't have one already, I would implore Groce, and indeed every Zips coach from now to the end of time to hire a sports psychologist, full time, to work on just this type of thing. b), Groce needs to stop giving the green light to everyone at all times, which I kind of suspect he gives players. A lot of posters have made great points about how Groce brings in unselfish, good people as players, and the transfer portal so far has hit us far, far less than most programs. This means Groce is earning players' trust, and this is probably one way he is doing it: I believe in you (and therefore, your shot) in all circumstances. That's obviously well-intentioned, but if I'm coaching a basketball team I am absolutely putting the kibbosh on all jumpers, from anybody, at certain points of the game (namely, as described above, when the other team is on a run). I would try to instill in my players that such prohibitions have absolutely nothing to do with my faith or belief in them or their game and everything to do with knowing the best way to get ourselves out of hairy game situations. It's an easy and frequent lesson that there's no player bigger than the team. But there's also no player bigger than the GAME. The game works a certain way, and if it's going a way you don't like, you might have to check your ego in order to correct it. Great post. I think something happened - who knows what, maybe nothing concrete - around the James Madison game that took the venom out of their stingers pretty much permanently. They got their groove back in spurts in the MAC tourney and the first half against Creighton, but this team just stopped playing as well as they can, and definitely not out of a lack of effort. So again, I think a sports psychologist is in order. To answer your question, the team met my preseason expectations, and fell short of my midway-through-the-season expectations.

Reminds me of an anecdote from one of the memoirs of Lewis Grizzard, a syndicated columnist in the 80s. I'm paraphrasing because I can't find it online, but he was the sports editor of a paper that ran a story about a HS girls basketball star. "What's amazing about Mary Jo Sue Ellen," said her coach, "is that she's made 18 of 20 of her free throw shots this year." Except the o in shots got turned into an i and went to press like that. "You idiot," said my boss. "I'm suing," said Mary Jo Sue Ellen's dad. "What about the other 2?" asked one guy who called in.

Holy hell, how did I forget about that one? Must've blocked it out. A+ typo.

I'm more bullish on the state of the program overall than I'm seeing from other posters, but there are some concerns, and the biggest one to me is this: Going into the season, the book on the Zips was that their deep frontcourt would carry the team offensively; with the backcourt being thinner, and our best guard being both ineffective and uninterested in shooting behind the arc, this would be a team that bullies teams inside. Instead, this team finished in the uppermost quartile in 3-pointers taken as a percentage of total field goal attempts (41.5%) despite ending up 274th in the country in 3PT%. This makes me worried that Groce is not going to meaningfully adjust his approach to the game based on the personnel he has. We still won that MAC largely because we had a generational talent in Freeman during a very down year for the MAC. We backed into the championship and the tournament, and while we have never won in the tourney, this was our worst loss in it. The was supposed to be one of the greatest Akron teams of all time. So, if my complaint about Groce is fair, and endures...sure hope he finds some shooters! But that gets me to the good news. I do think Groce is a good recruiter and a good motivator, and for these reasons I'd be willing to wager that, whatever the consensus is on how Akron will fare next year once we have an idea of what our roster looks like, we will exceed those expectations.

A complete rebuild was coming regardless of how this game shook out.

I don't remember the details, but he got into a fight.

You can at least be glad that you aren't an Ohio State and Akron fan, like I am. Not only do they (naturally) play each other with a lot more frequency than Illinois plays Akron, but also there's a contingent here that finds it disloyal or contemptible for Akron fans to be OSU fans. We debate it sometimes! I hate it!

I said my heart goes out to him. I take that back.

*My heart does go out to Rollins. *I don't think we talk enough about stellar our defense is. They kept us in this game while we had an all-too-frequent drought on offense, and not for the first time. *Taking the lead in the series against Can't is a nice little cherry on top. So is beating them three times. *We don't look like we have completely shaken off our issues from down the stretch, but we did beat a Can't team that rolled into the finals in style, an Ohio team that made us look terribad in our last matchup against them, and bottom line, we are the one and only champions of the 2023-24 Mid-American Conference.

5 straight empty possessions since I typed that. Apparently I have the power to jinx. KENT'S PLAYING REALLY WELL, SPORTS GODS!

Been a minute since I've seen an Akron game where both teams are simultaneously hot on offense.

Uh, the scorebug is wrong, isn't it? It's counting the 3, which the announcer said didn't count? Am I wrong about something? I have a head cold so I'm a little slow and hard of hearing ATM.

Given that we are only down 1 anyway and Freeman has 0 fouls, I'll take it.