Dave in Green

It's a very narrow view to believe that crappy programs forever remain crappy and good programs forever remain good. In fact DePaul once had a consistent winning program that has fallen on hard times while over the same years other teams rose from hard times to consistent winning. Over the coming years other teams will trade places near the top and bottom of the pecking order. In a few years DePaul will be playing in a newly built $164 million arena being added to McCormick Place in Chicago. DePaul needs a winning program to fill all those shiny new seats. Hiring a top coach will be necessary to revitalize the program and produce a consistent winning record. If Hurley doesn't take the job there are other options.

Absolutely. DePaul's in the Big East, which had the second highest conference RPI this season and placed 6 of its 10 teams (60%) in the NCAA tournament. Chicago is a hotbed for basketball recruiting. If DePaul's administration made a major commitment to becoming a perennial basketball power, it could be very attractive to an upcoming young coach. But I still think Hurley shoots for something higher.

You are correct about print newspaper advertising offering more general access to that media's audience. You can do some targeting by requesting ad placement in the section most likely to reach a target audience, i.e. sports section for certain demographic males and family or society section for certain demographic females. But results measurements of print ad effectiveness are extremely hard to come by. Internet advertising is similar in that it can be targeted to pages containing editorial content that appeals to specific demographics. Internet offers the advantage of knowing exactly how many people click on those pages and were exposed to the ads. But it still doesn't tell what percentage of page viewers paid any attention to the ads unless viewers actually click on the ads. Even then a percentage of viewers didn't really want to read the ad but clicked it by mistake. In fact some viewers may become so annoyed by popup ads obscuring content that they may be less likely to be attracted to that advertiser. It drives some to employ popup blockers that eliminate some ads. Print advertising has been around for centuries and is pretty well understood. Internet advertising is in its infancy and is still evolving.

Some were trying to put an optimistic spin on the nightmare draw in spite of the reality that going up against the best pressing defense in the country without a legitimate D-I PG was a disaster waiting to happen. The loss of other players on the eve of the game only made the disaster worse. The Zips' size would have helped them match up better against a team without a pressing defense.

One measure of how unpredictable the first day of this year's tournament was compared to last year's is the number of perfect ballots in ESPN's Tournament Challenge going into the second day. This year, out of 11.57 million entries, only 273 were perfect at the end of the first day. Last year 18,471 of 11 million entries were perfect, more than 67 times as many as this year. Link

We can watch to see where Kincade transfers and see how well he does there.

Thank you Keener for doing the homework on Chapman. I was wondering if anyone was going to try to dig a little deeper into why he didn't appear to set the world on fire at Ashland.

Love the video of the Georgia State coach falling out of his chair as his son hits the long 3-pointer that sinks Baylor: Link

The first bar to reach for is to be best in NEO, then best in the MAC, then beyond. If UA can't even reach the first bar, what use is there in daydreaming about even higher goals? Continuous improvement, one step at a time, is a practical strategy when reaching for the sky.

No knowledgeable Zips fan thought that VCU was a nice draw in the NCAA tournament. Facing VCU's havoc defense with the Zips star point guard (Alex Abreu) lost to the team was a nightmare draw. And then it got worse. Starting shooting guard Brian Walsh was so sick with the flu that he could barely move on the court for 9 scoreless and ineffective minutes. Backup center Pat Forsythe was so sick with the flu that he only lasted 3 scoreless and ineffective minutes. Backup shooting guard Deji Ibitayo had back spasms so bad he missed the game completely.

Hurley was in survival mode after his early T and became much less animated with the refs as he knew a second T would have taken him off the floor.

Having looked at a fair number of college team rosters, I can tell you that some schools list both scholarship and non-scholarship players and some list only scholarship players. The Zips used to list both and recently switched to listing scholarship players only. I have no idea why some schools elect to do it one way and some the other or why UA decided to switch.

LTU fans are pretty concerned that Coach Mike White won't be around much longer as he's one of the hottest young head coaches in the country. LTU gave him his first head coaching position in 2011, and in his first four seasons he's already won 100 games. This is his third straight appearance in the NIT. He'll likely get a big money offer from a high-major conference school within a year or two.

UA's formal name is The University of Akron.

So that's why I feel so sleepy all the time. How about this directly from the WNIT:

Just in case you or any of your staff may secretly read ZipsNation looking for good ideas (yeah, I get the humor in that), there were two articles in today's New York Times sports section that I thought covered new ground and might be of interest to you. The first was a college story about a team that blew out VCU in a recent game: Davidson Math Students Lend a Hand to Basketball Team There's lots more to that story that's worth reading. The most important point is to get other areas of UA engaged in using their expertise to help the Zips win more games. There are probably many professors at UA who could care less if athletics went away. But all you need to do is find one or two willing to help to gain the edge that Davidson showed this season that will probably get a pre-season predicted 12th-place conference team into the NCAA tournament. The second story was about the best team in the NBA this season, the Atlanta Hawks, and some of the pioneering ideas they've been using: Key to Hawks’ Team Play: Nourish the Individual Again, there's much, much more to the story. But the key point is shifting practice time to more one-on-one from traditional team practice. You may already be aware of the concepts covered in these two articles since basketball is your life. But they caught my attention and made a lot of sense to me, so I thought I'd mention it here.

Not sure why it's necessary to start a new thread when a perfectly good long-running one already exists here. But the proposed arena was a multi-use facility for the City of Akron that would also be used by the Zips for basketball. A really nice on-campus dedicated Zips basketball arena could be built for much less than $76 million. Apples and oranges.

Hmmm:

Good find, B&G. I had mentioned in another thread about ABJ/Ohio.com Zips vs. Browns coverage that with online newspapers there's no more BSing about who's reading what stories. The ABJ knows exactly how many hits each story on their website is getting, and the subjects that get the most hits get the most future coverage. Complaining about lack of Zips coverage on Ohio.com is wasted energy. It's all about the numbers. The electronic board in the news room with instantaneous results shows how sophisticated it's getting. It would be productive if we posted links on ZipsNation to every Zips story on Ohio.com and tried to attract more people to ZipsNation to click on those links. Increased traffic for Zips stories on Ohio.com would result in more coverage of Zips athletics. Of course the more we complain about Zips coverage on Ohio.com, the less likely people are to bother to go there to read the coverage, which in turn will result in even less coverage and even more complaining. Vicious circle.

I was also skeptical about Coach Bowden in 2009. I said at the time that there appeared to be a major disconnect between his coaching resume and his inability to land a job at the level of school that would typically be looking for a coach with that type of resume. I saw that as a big caution flag, and hoped UA did, too. But I concluded that if a careful study should prove that the risk was not as great as it seemed, that would be great. In fact I later did some more in depth research on Coach Bowden's background and found a lot of evidence to support that he would, indeed, be a good risk -- the same conclusion that UA reached.

tboned, from top to bottom the three officials above from the Zips-Bulls box score are Darryl Smith, Mike Sanzere and, your choice, Glenn "Buddy" Mayborg. You are not alone in observing that Mayborg is not a Buddy of the Zips, not that the Zips aren't in good company:

It's a matter of public record that the first public lobbying for Coach Bowden began on ZipsNation at 4:50 p.m. Nov. 28, 2009:

In private conversation I'll bet just about every coach in the country would name you two or three officials they'd rather not see because, for whatever reason, they seem to make an imbalanced number of questionable calls and no-calls against that coach's team. tboned, select your ref from the three below who officiated the Zips-Bulls MAC tournament game:

We hear a few rumors, read a few stories, maybe even have an inside contact who tells us their version, then try to interpret ambiguous terms as best we can. Sometimes we understand that's not enough to reach a definitive conclusion about everything that really happened and sometimes we have a tendency to jump to conclusions as if we know exactly what happened from a jumbled heap of circumstantial evidence. As for who was actually most responsible for the Coach Bowden hire, it was first seriously discussed on ZipsNation way back in 2009 before the iCoach disaster. I think that planted the seed that ultimately resulted in the call to Coach Bowden. Since that has as much relevance as some of the other theories, I'm giving ZipsNation credit.

Zips could have won it all in 2013 in Hawaii by that tournament's format. That's obviously the preferred format that the Zips are always trying for.