ZippyforPresident

Egg before chicken or chicken before egg?

Nice. Hope you keep up with Akron basketball a little bit even after Q's time here. Hopefully the program keeps moving forward and becomes even more nationally relevant and truly exciting to watch. No short shrift to those that came before and allowed the university and community to have those expectations. #StrongCharacterStrongFoundation

Not too far from hitting 1,000 in a Zips uniform too. Good for him. Congrats. He certainly gave it all for Akron Basketball. He played big in a lot of big games for this school. Contributed a lot tonight too. Makes me think back to when we played Notre Dame in the tournament when Q had a great game and wasn't intimidated in the least. Heart of a lion.

I want to say that we're better than this. But at this juncture, maybe we just aren't. I've become accustomed to a certain level of Akron Zips Basketball and this just isn't it. I certainly understand that teams encounter adversity throughout a season, but to put up this sort of defensive effort with the season on the line? I don't really know what to say about that. It's not like they were intimidated by the atmosphere of all 2,000 people there or anything...

SMDH. Defense? Defense? Anyone? 47 points given up in 20 minutes? On pace to give up 94 points tonight? I'm sure we'll come out victorious with a second half effort like that...

Zips are now the only MAC East team left. Crazy.

Spectacular. Titan of the Tankard indeed. One correction though. You misspelled "broodoo."

Interestingly enough, Caremelo is hitting 33.3%, or one third, of his three point attempts this season, although he certainly has far fewer attempts than most. It would be very reassuring to see Carmelo add to, or at least remain consistent with, his performance at EMU. If this team is going to go places in March, he is the "spark plug" that is gonna get this Zips engine firing on all cylinders. Not because of his three point shooting prowess of course, but because of the innate fluidity the offense demonstrates with his presence. It certainly appeared as if this squad turned a corner at EMU. Hopefully. GO ZIPS!

Carmelo is having a nice game so far. Perhaps he's starting to put it all together, he's been showing some good things recently.

I didn't even have to clear my cache. I just checked it out earlier today. I entered the school name in the search box, clicked on the school, the voting pop up came up, I clicked on "vote now" and it required me to enter a captcha, I subsequently entered it, clicked on submit, closed the pop up and searched for the school again to see if it permitted multiple votes, which it did. Although, I did click on the "vote now" before creating a login of any sort, so perhaps that explains it.

That's incorrect. If you just click on the "vote now" option you can vote an unlimited amount of times per day and you don't need to log in to ncaa.com, google plus, twitter or facebook to do so. Obviously you have no chance of winning the individual prize if you don't log in to one of those accounts at some point, but you don't have to log into anything to contribute to your school's vote total. I'm sure that's how a school like Arkansas State is currently leading the first round.

I see what ya did there... Still miss that place though. Made some pretty great memories there. Hope undergrads are doing the same at the Info. Football is on its way to being relevant again.

Video from 2011's T-Shirt exchange.

This one is a complete toss up for me. Begging for a Zips victory. This game is at our house. Time to finally bring the pain to somebody else. Just win baby. Just effing win. GO ZIPS!

Not really.

I also think it would have been cool if they had made a bold statement, just like basketball did. Basketball has some bad ass looking alternate unis. But, either way people are going to complain - "too much gold... not enough gold... kangaroos look stupid... bring back the logo from 1918... etc..." At least they tried something new, so kudos for that. Although it was kind of a safe move, at least it was an original idea and specific to the school. - Most important quality of the new helmet: Zips are undefeated while wearing them...

Win little... Maybe this is where Akron plants its foot in the ground and starts to change direction. Hopefully either Pohl or Hirschman are healthy enough to go against Michigan next week... I will be taking the road trip. Go Zips.

Go Zips! Given 'em hell.

I completely agree. In fact, that was pretty much my point. Like HS Stripes said, an arena is just one piece to a much bigger puzzle. Of course having a good coach and program stability are vital to the success of a program. You can have the best facilities there are, but if you can't win a game, the stands will be empty on gameday. Akron basketball has good coaches, program stability, and they certainly win their fair share of games. But other mid major schools within Akron's recruiting footprint have winning traditions too. Look at Xavier and Dayton and where they get to play, or even OU and Marshall. At this point, nice facilities are the one element that Akron basketball is sorely lacking. Having better facilities gives the coaching staff an additional tool to help bring recruits to campus. Is it hypothetically possible for the program to reach a consistent sweet sixteen type of level while playing in the JAR? Maybe, but when you're competing for recruits against other winning programs who have much better facilities, it makes the journey to that point a lot more difficult. I've never been on Duke's campus, so I don't really know what their facilities are like. But I'm sure if their facilities put them at a disadvantage against the likes of UNC and NC State, they'd build better ones or improve what they have. I'm sure they have the money for it. I'd also imagine that Cameron has a sort of sentimental value to most of their fans, as well as historical significance to college basketball fans in general, kind of like Allen Fieldhouse at Kansas or Hinkle Fieldhouse at Butler, which I believe is currently undergoing a renovation. Those places are destinations on many college basketball fans' lists of places to visit and thus they are "elite" and special. I'm pretty confident in guaranteeing you that no one has a bucket list that says "ride the bleachers at James A. Rhodes Arena."

Well said. If nothing else, a brand new, state of the art arena gives coach Dambrot a lot more help recruiting and room for the program to actually grow. The level of talent he's been able to recruit in the past few years has certainly been excellent, but with a legitimate gym to play in, I'm sure he would be able to land some of the level of players that he might have missed out on in the past because a new arena provides tangible proof to a recruit that the school is very dedicated to winning basketball games and to the pursuits of the players. In this case the arena would be part of an equation that would go something like: Great Coach + Program Stability + Winning Tradition + Elite Facilities = Elite level recruits. And when elite level athletes are paired with a great coach, unparalleled heights can be reached, at which point promoting basketball games in order to sell tickets would be an afterthought. Certainly it's not quite that simple. But if basketball had the kind of facilities that football now has, I can only imagine where the basketball program could be right now. Also, in response to your comments regarding the media and the school in columbus, I think the Ohio/Akron rivalry has actually started to gain some traction in this state. People (the media included) have started to notice what's been going on with these two programs. Without Zeke and D.J., who knows what will happen, but the last four years could not have been much better in garnering interest for this in state rivalry with the excellent level at which both of these heated rivals have been performing.

A little trip down south this winter doesn't sound like too bad of an idea. Coming back to Akron with a W doesn't sound too tough either... Especially since South Carolina went 14-18 last season. Yet another SEC school poised to bite the dust against "little Akron."

Wrong link. The appropriate message board is here

Maybe he considers Zeke a lock and not a sleeper? After all, Zeke is already a better big than the ones that he listed, and has much more potential too. Just a thought... nothing more... nothing less. Also, although I think that San Antonio is a well run organization with a great coach, I'd love to see Zeke, LeBron and Norris Cole together. That would be a lot of fun, although unlikely. But trades do happen during the draft! San Antonio would make sense though, Zeke would be Tim Duncan's heir apparent. He has all the physical tools for it. Good luck Zeke! Looking forward to the draft! Even if Thursday, June 27th is the night before finals for the first 5 week summer session

That's really scary. Definitely not something to take lightly. I remember Coach Dambrot mentioned something about it during his post game interview after the Miami game.

What terrible news. Hopefully this gets straightened out and Alex can be back in time for the MAC Tournament. All that anyone can really do is to wait for more information to be released about the situation before jumping to hastily made conclusions. I really hope the team can overcome this adversity and keep playing at the highest level possible. And hopefully, whether innocent or guilty, Rico learns from whatever mistakes or decisions he may have made that led to the events that have transpired thus far. Sometimes its easy to get caught up in some really dumb stuff without realizing how severely it can impact the rest of your life. There are a lot of people in this world that will drag you all the way to the bottom if you let them.