MDZip

Good article in Slate from Ken Pomeroy about why the deck is stacked so heavily against mid-majors. Regardless of what system is used, humans need to be smarter about how to think about that system. It’s a mistake to ignore game location, and it’s a mistake to use arbitrary thresholds to bundle together quality wins and bad losses. Under the current process, when comparing teams of similar quality, you can throw out all the analysis of wins and losses and simply use the size of a school’s basketball budget as the tiebreaker. It works just as well.

Interesting the article was in the Chron as an homonym for how much of the rest of the MAC sometimes refers to us. Maybe the fix was in. Also mildly interesting MAC connection since the UH coach, Kelvin Sampson was at Indiana with Senderoff when he got into some NCAA issues before coming to Kent.

Darn it he's very unlikely to make it, he's at 956 with not much time left. Wish he would have made the milestone but he still had a nice career with the Zips. But completely under the radar, Antino did pass 1,000 career points in the semifinal win over Ball State. Hope he gets some recognition for that.

Your bracket must really be a mess now. Out of the 8 games played yesterday, the lower seed won six of them and one of the winners was a 4 over a 5. All three 3 seeds that played lost.

Wednesday against Houston in Houston 7 seed

I think I'm going to leave this one unfinished. Sort of feels like how the season was.

Yes let the Big Dog eat!!

Well good news isn't we couldn't have played much worse offensively and are still in it. Just too bad this is what the country is seeing as championship level MAC basketball. Hope we continue to be a strong second half team.

Not unhappy to see Hall head to the bench with two fouls.

And of course UConn Cinci is going to run long. Grrr

My happiest Zips quiz ever, this one's for all the marbles (and I've heard our opponents marbles are pretty small :). Tonight at the Q, 7:30 PM on ESPN2 against our biggest rival, can't (sorry for that near reference ;-)) get any better than that. We all know who they are so there will be no reference by name, nor will there be any question about who wins, I can't see any real Zips fan voting against them at this point. Go Zips!

I tried to think which team I'd hate losing to more. Its a bit of a tossup but I did a bit of schadenfreude on the Bobcats board and I've seen a few instances where some of their posters have insisted that they need to be the team that made the Big Dance because either Akron (or Kent in this particular instance) were going to get smoked in the NCAA tournament as though their little run five years ago somehow has some bearing on how they would perform now. Ugh, glad Kent knocked them out. Should be an exciting atmosphere for the championship. I'm sure there will be some whining from the rest of the league how Akron and Kent have such an advantage being so close that this final was a set up.

All winners again! People who also got the last two questions right (Kwan hit the first three pointer and Kwan-Antino-Noah out-stat'ed BD-Ivey-Utomi 48 to 46) included Glib Shanley, kreed5120, feetg10 and yours truly. Onto the one that REALLY matters. :-)

For the right to play one of our two most hated rivals in the MAC Tournament Championship we have to get by Ball State first. Normally I'd say yawn but Ball State hung right with us and could heave easily beaten us at the JAR earlier this year and it wasn't easy getting past WMU yesterday. All indication are Persons will be ready to go. Lets go Zips!

And Ball State survives, Zips will see the Cardinals tomorrow at 5:30.

Ball State and WMU in quite a battle seems like its been one point one way of the other for most of the second half. 56-55 BSU right now.

Everyone wins and nobody does :-). The only three people who guessed the combo of Noah (2) and Josh (3) to lead in combined three pointers (Kwan/Ivey 2/0 and Antino/Utomi 1/0) also guessed that Kwan was going to lead in the points/rebounds combo. Big Dog won that one by a long shot (double double of 24 and 10 to Kwan's 8 and 4) so I'm going to give the win to the memory of GoZips.

Antino was boxing out Thompson with a few seconds left, they got a little tangled and Thompson appeared to shove/throw an elbow at Jackson's head. There appeared to be some verbal and maybe some physical retaliation and Thompson and Jackson both got hit with T's. It also happened to be the fifth foul for each so it may have appeared as ejections but were not. I think you could have made a case on the elbow from Thompson for a flagrant II and an ejection but glad the refs just let it finish out and get done with it. On to the semis for the 11th straight year!

Game over as usual with EMU some ugliness but finally a little of what we've been hoping to see from the Zips finally crushing an opponent 79-62. On to WMU/BSU co-champions of the west and the 4/5 seeds.

Good to see the ref's not use an ejection at the end of a game like that. So Jackson is still eligible for tomorrow. Also good to see some senior leadership from Big Dog almost looked like he was a parent dragging his kid away from trouble.

OK you can go now - up by 16 with 2 minutes to go should be safe.

Lee fouls out - he's had a poor shooting game (4-15) but he could catch fire at any time so glad he's done.

Absolutely not, Zips only up by six

I think a shove in the back is a Flagrant 1 regardless of intent.

14 minutes in and Thompson has a double double. Wow. And he's a sophomore, two more years of him.