Dave in Green

So you know what our schedule is now? Would you please share it with us? Akron had the #4 non-conference SOS in the MAC last season, and a top-50% non-conference SOS overall. This year our schedule is tougher than that. We should be top-4 in the MAC once again and move up to around the 60th percentile nationally. It should be the toughest schedule Dambrot has ever coached against. First, I appreciate your enthusiasm as a Zips fan. Never lose that. Now, we're pretty sure of most of this season's schedule, aren't we? Maybe we're going to add Duke and Kentucky. That would change things a little. Last year's SOS was #170 out of 345 DI schools, so the Zips were just slightly above the 50th percentile for all DI schools, and only about 20% make the NCAA tournament. What would your definition be of a "very tough schedule?" My definition would be somewhere in the top 25%, which would be an SOS of about #85 or better. I don't think the Zips are going to make that cut, which is why I said their schedule is not that tough. Of course, it's a relative term. The final Zips schedule could be fairly tough by Zips or MAC standards but not very tough by NCAA tournament standards. I don't say this to downgrade the Zips. I believe that KD is trying to elevate the program at a realistic and sustainable pace, and I totally support that. It's just that we aren't suddenly going to be there from one season to the next. It's a process that takes time to do right, as opposed to taking the cheater shortcuts.

So more than half of the $800k tOSU has spent on this to date has gone to a PR firm and a firm that specializes in consulting colleges on how to minimize NCAA sanctions. The attorneys have got to be really POed about this. While $800k is chump change to high-powered attorneys, they still have to be steamed that so much of it is going to PR guys and consultants.

Fantasizing is healthy.

Since the Zips don't have a very tough schedule, they'd have to win a really large percentage of their regular season games to be considered for an at-large bid. Let's say that have a 30-game regular season schedule. I think they'd have to win 90% of those games (27-3 record) and go at least a couple of rounds in the MAC tournament. That would give them a 29-4 record. That might do it if some of the regular season wins were over the top OOC teams on their schedule. However, I think the likelihood is small because the Zips have too many new parts to integrate into the team, and they'll probably lose a number of early season games. So, my totally unscientific, Kentucky windage estimate is that 5% is a little high. I'd put it in the 2% range -- possible but highly unlikely. Then again, what were the odds of VCU being selected as an at-large team last season, let alone making it to the Final Four? Stuff happens.

I've always been a firm believer in results over form. Unorthodox shooters who hit a good percentage of their shots are just fine with me.

Recruits don't just select schools alone. They also consider the conferences the schools are in. If UA should ever squeak into the Big East, the Zips' leverage to attract top recruits would be increased several magnitudes, perhaps more so in basketball than football. Fantasizing for a moment about Zips basketball in the Big East, the first season would likely find them fighting desperately to get a step above the cellar. But the longterm possibilities are intriguing, to say the least. Add a new arena into the mix, and what do you suppose local interest would be in a steady stream of highly ranked Big East basketball powers playing in Akron? Where might some of the best basketball talent in Ohio want to go if they wanted to play close to home against many of the top college basketball powers in the country?

Tree may be a work in progress, but #1 sure showed some sweet offensive moves in the highlight reel at the 0:44 and 1:08 marks. Remember the frustration we had with Bardo not going hard to the bucket and slamming it through? Fuhgeddaboudit! Tree, Harney, Gilliam and Egner all know what to do with the ball when they get it in close. Sure wish a box score would pop up somewhere.

Even DiG didn't need to see McCrea's stats to know how good he is. He aced my eyeball test last season. McCrea will provide a serious test for the Zips' aspiring young forwards. The coaches should give copies of all of McCrea's game tapes to Tree and tell him if he can stop McCrea, he'll be in the running for MAC defensive player of the year as a freshman.

I appreciate anyone who admits their greatness derives from beer and hot dogs. With much practice, one can also achieve greatness without the hot dogs. But the beer is mandatory. No question that yeast causes one's IQ to rise.

KD already knows what the vets can do under game conditions. Now's the time to see what the new guys can do, even if it's just an exhibition game against a way overmatched opponent.

Typical. You keep the booze for yourself and share nothing with the rest of us but words.

I suspect that KD was rewarding Harney for doing well in practice, which is pretty much what GoZips has been saying all along. Doesn't mean that Harney will be near the top of the charts when the season starts. It may be that KD was just interested in seeing how Harney could handle game conditions. Depending on how he responded, it also may be a good early indication that Harney has the potential to make a meaningful contribution as a true freshman. When the tallest player on the opposing team is 6-5, about the only Zips player who couldn't match up at power forward would be Rico.

Does anyone posting on this forum really need a remedial lesson that practice is different from actual game play? DUH! The only reason that people continue to post about how good the players look in practice is because, up until today, they've only been practicing. There was nothing else to talk about. In any case, why would any good Zips fan not want to hear that the Zips look good in practice? The alternative would be that they don't look good. Today the Zips blew out a mediocre small Canadian college. Once again, there will be positive and negative things to talk about regarding individual and team play, with the understanding that this exhibition game was only a step above practice. While it doesn't directly translate to regular season game play any more than practice does, it does provide more clues about the abilities of the players. So, please, please, pretty please, let's not waste bandwidth on remedial lectures about how much different a major regular season college game is from a minor exhibition game or practice. No one is arguing the point, so no case needs to be made.

Wait, you mean 55-24 is not the final score?

Go to hell, you Suckeye-loving butt munch. Now we're back to normal! Those who haven't met you don't know what a lovable teddy bear you are in person, and how you overcompensate on the forum to try to project an entirely different image. But I understand.

GoZips, you ask everyone to have a little faith in KD. I do. I believe what the man says, and his most recent public quote is: “We may be more athletic than we have ever been, but that doesn’t mean we are better.” So I think it's fair for those who lack your boundless enthusiasm to take KD at his word and not automatically assume that the more athletic Zips will automatically be better. There's still a lot of work to be done to make that happen. I've seen one Zips practice, and I think they have a lot of potential to be better. I think they have enough potential that it's virtually certain they'll be better. But it's not a done deal. As I said earlier, the one thing I am absolutely certain of is that they are going to be more entertaining and fun to watch. The increased interest from fans who haven't attended many Zips basketball games in the past is well-founded.

A couple of really thoughtful posts here by Doug Snyder and Districtballer. Doug's well-documented point about the difference between the Top 16 and the Sweet 16 is important. Every season, teams outside the Top 16, Top 25 and even Top 50 end up making the Sweet 16. It's all about peaking at the right time, as VCU did last season. I personally prefer the kind of coaching that results in a team underachieving during the regular season and overachieving in the post-season tournaments as opposed to the other way around. Tom Izzo has been a master of this at MSU for years, generally losing quite a few regular season games to weaker teams and generally doing well in the tournaments. Sweet 16 is a much more realistic goal for the Zips than Top 16. It requires winning the MAC tournament and winning one more NCAA tournament game than Ohio won two seasons ago. It's not easy, but it's not out of the Zips reach. Districtballer is obviously a serious student of basketball, and a clear thinker, as well. We ZN.O regulars tend to cite the same points over and over, so it's great to have an outside perspective from another team's fan who comes here to exchange ideas rather than exchange insults.

This is one of the better football threads I've read on ZN.O because it consists mostly of rational discussion about what goes on inside the team from a player perspective intead of the usual repetitive, boring trash talk.

KD pretty much sums up in the ABJ article a balanced first impression of the team that combines optimism with caution: “We may be more athletic than we have ever been, but that doesn’t mean we are better.” Summing up everyone's assessments in this thread, it seems to me that: The optimists are focusing on what the Zips might accomplish if a combination of improvement in the veteran players and rapid development of the athletic new players coincides with the coming together of all the players into a balanced and cohesive team. The pessimists are focusing on the fact that there's no guarantee that all this will happen, and that the odds are against dramatic improvement over what we've seen the past seven seasons. At this point in the season, both views are correct. No one really knows how much potential the individual players and team will realize or how far they might go if they realize their potential big time.

Everyone? Isn't that a bit overstated? There's been a pretty wide diversity of opinion here, ranging from Sweet 16 to lucky to break the Top 100, and everything in between. And, not sorry to say, a lot can be learned by watching practice and scrimmage if you know what to look for. For example, a fair number of the players practicing and scrimmaging against each other are known quantities. We've seen them play lots of games against other teams. We know how well they run, jump, handle the ball, rebound, play D, etc., etc. Now we're watching newcomers match up against them. When we see that some of the newcomers in their very first practices and scrimmages demonstrate talents and abilities as good as or better than the known quantities, it does mean something. So please feel free to push the envelope of pessimism. But please don't misrepresent the opinions of those who've seen with their own eyes what only exists in your imagination.

And akzipper zooms ahead of skip-zip in the DPI (derating percentage index).

I sure hope the coaches and players are setting a slightly higher goal than a solid Top-100 RPI team by the end of the season. The Zips average final season RPI for the last 7 seasons is a solid #83 with a best of #60 and a worst of #101. So a solid Top-100 RPI team by the end of the season is pretty much the norm for KD's teams. Regardless of what fans may think, if the team believes it could be the best Zips team ever, they should set their sights high and have a stretch goal of being at least a Top-50 RPI team by the end of the season.

B&G, I get the point you were trying to make. From the quick eyeball test in practice, this team is pretty impressive looking. I get that the impressive part you're talking about is purely potential at this point. And I know from your history as a realistic poster that you understand that much of the potential in the world goes to waste because it's never fully realized. I don't think any of us really knows what some of the great MAC teams of the past looked like when subjected to the eyeball test in practice. Maybe they practiced like Michael Jordan's Bulls, or maybe they looked pretty ordinary in practice and overachieved in games. But I completely agree with you that there's good reason to be optimistic about the potential of the current Zips. Having an athletic and skilled 7-footer at center automatically places any MAC team near the top of the eyeball test, and the surrounding cast this season doesn't hurt at all. On your point about Tree being 6-8, 240, the official roster currently lists him at 6-7, 210. I think in an earlier thread we speculated that it would be nice if he was still growing and could get up to the 6-8, 240 range. But if he can play effectively at a lighter weight, there are some advantages in not carrying too much bulk. I like that Tree has that same intensity I saw in Egner when I witnessed him leading Jackson HS to a state championship, and think they both have the potential to play bigger than their physical dimensions. The next phase of the eyeball test is how these players look in exhibition games. So the reports from Canada will be anxiously awaited here. But KD told us at Saturday's practice that he was way more interested in seeing all the players and how various combinations performed together under game conditions than he was about winning the games. So our level of enthusiasm shouldn't be diminished if the Zips don't blow out all the teams they play in Canada. Last season I made three predictions about Zips players that turned out to be overoptimistic. I said that Euton would develop into a keeper, Egner would earn more PT as a freshman, and that Zeke had his breakout game in the MAC opener against Can't and was going to be dominant for the rest of the season. Euton is gone, Egner didn't get a lot of PT, and Zeke had another up-and-down season of good and so-so game performances. The penalty of overoptimism is disappointment. So I'm going to try to curb my enthusiasm and be a little more realistic this season. But that doesn't mean I don't think this team will be more fun and entertaining to watch than previous Zips teams. Watching them run, jump and score is going to generate fan enthusiasm, which will in turn generate more optimism. That will be followed by the inevitable disappointment when they lose. In the end, a lot of the posts here this season will be similar to a lot of last season's posts, because the more the Zips change, the more we fans remain the same.

We should all have high expectations for Gilliam. Here are just a few quotes from the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) website, where Gilliam played his first two years of DI college ball in the America East Conference, which is not too far below the MAC in overall conference strength: Freshman Season: 2008-09: Earned four America East Conference Rookie-of-the-Week selections, the most in the conference last season and the most ever for a Retriever in six years of league play… Finished fifth in the conference in field goal percentage, hitting 51.4% from the floor, the best figure for a guard in the league… In America East contests, he finished 20th in scoring (11.5 ppg), and eighth in field goal percentage (49.3%) and free throw percentage (79.2%)… Scored the most points (349) for a Retriever freshman since Peter Mulligan amassed 450 in the 2000-01 season and produced the seventh-most in 23 years of Division I competition… Scored in double figures in 18 games, including 12 of the last 16… Hit 15 of his last 29 three-point attempts over UMBC’s final eight games. Sophomore Season: 2009-10: Led the Retrievers in scoring, averaging 13.5 points per game. He was even more proficient in America East Conference play, scoring at a 15.3 points per game clip (sixth in America East), and most proficient in road league games with a 17.6 scoring average. The wing guard also led UMBC in three-point field goals (42), free throws (89) and free throw percentage (80.9%, fourth in America East) and steals (42, 1.5 per game, fifth in America East). It should be noted that the Retrievers had a terrible season in 2009-10, finishing a miserable 4-26. Without the supporting cast that graduated after his freshman season, Gilliam didn't have much backup and the defenses could pretty much focus on trying to stop him. The collapse of UMBC's basketball program is probably a key reason why he left and transferred to UA.

Yep, Harney (#10) is closest to Q in the fro department. GoZips has done a good job of describing his performance. From what I saw in the one practice I attended, Harney's playing style is also similar to Q's. But he appears to be more of a full-time 3 where Q is better able to slide back and forth between the 2 and 3.