ZachTheZip

We're not a team with good talent several guys deep. But Syracuse is not fielding close the max number of scholarship players yet. It will take one or two more recruiting classes to replenish the depth lost due to the coaching change forcing players out last season.

Interesting interpretation. I always thought one of the little @ signs meant an away game. If that is still the case, I believe you have the location of the games bass ackwards. I believe you're completely right. Looks like I saw the @ sign and thought "away game", but applied it to the wrong team.

FIU's schedule according to their message board. Looks like we're playing them on the road next year and get them at home in 2012. If true, it means we will only have 5 home games next year and unless TW can pull some connections our only OOC home game will be against an FCS team.

...except if you read closely, you'll see that EJ Thomas created this event... Only because nobody else did and EJ desperately needs people to show up to events. The programming boards were responsible for us winning that vote and getting us involved in the first place. This is their creation and they did nothing to promote it.

Even if we played a schedule made by Charlie Coles, 5 losses is about the max you would could have if you want an at-large bid. Mid-major at-large bids are disappearing. They're almost vanished completely. They're not disappearing. The amount of Non-BCS at-large bids doubled last year, and was the most in 5 years. Who are you counting as a mid-major? C-USA and the MWC aren't mid-majors. Neither is the A-10. I only see Utah State (WAC) and Gonzaga (WCC) at mid-major at-larges last tournament. That's it. Two. The number of at-large mid major teams since the 2006 tournament, acording to The Mid-Majority's Red Line: '06 - 5 '07 - 4 '08 - 3 '09 - 1 '10 - 2 So yeah. We doubled the amount of at-large bids last tournament. Great.

That podcast works nice. Thanks for posting. I agree. Can we get something like this for ZipsLive? I can't always listen to it on the radio. I missed Monday's one with Caleb Porter.

Even if we played a schedule made by Charlie Coles, 5 losses is about the max you would could have if you want an at-large bid. Mid-major at-large bids are disappearing. They're almost vanished completely. I think the strength of the MAC has a lot to do with consideration for a bid. We will play 15 OOC games including a Bracketbuster, but a minimum of 17 MAC games (19 if we make the tournament final, and if we don't we probably don't deserve a bid anyway). That means the MAC games count more than the OOC portion of the schedule in terms of RPI. If the weak MAC West teams played horribly weak OOC schedules but racked up winning records, it benefits us more when we play them compared to if they played top-10 OOC schedules but only had 3 or 4 wins because your opponents' records count toward 50% of the RPI formula, but their SOS only counts for 25% (the final 25% is the Win/Loss against said opponent). So it benefits us greatly to play average teams with strong records, such as top teams in low-major conferences regardless of their RPI. Throw in 4 or 5 BCS teams to get an "impressive" win or two and you have the makings of a schedule that will get you a top 50 RPI and some at-large consideration. But that all depends on whether the MAC realizes that weaker teams scheduling far beyond their competitive level hurts the top teams greatly.

Coach Porter is going to be on 19 Action News tonight around maybe 10:30

Uh, I'm pretty sure the Syracuse staff knows what kind of defense the Zips will play. I bet they even played against it before. Coaches are people with strong habits. Running the ball worked great against us last year, so they think it will work just the same this year.

Since UA was voted the 2010 Campus of the Year in Campus Activities Magazine a while back, CAM is hosting an event at EJ Thomas tonight for students. As a special thank you to UA students for being voted Campus of the Year in 2010 by Campus Activities Magazine - CAM presents the interactive "comedy in action" performance of Jeff Civillico and the hilarious magic and comedy of Tim Gabrielson. Good thing nobody knew about it until the actual day of the event. Thanks to the RHPB/ZPN "marketing" team.

The colder the better.

I totally disagree, it's time KD wins a big OOC game! Maybe we're at the point where we're supposed to win a big OOC game. We should be a better team than Miami and about equal with Minnesota.

Stams is supposedly working for STO now. The ABJ articles are generally on the front page of the sports section, at least more often than not. As for today's articles, New Zips football coach Rob Ianello eager to pass tests The idea that he's taking a test and being graded on it implies that there are right and wrong answers to situations like deciding whether to go for 2 or to do a fake punt. It seems like a way to re-enforce conservative playcalling. The other article is Tom Gaffney interviewing himself about five questions on Zips football.

Just win the games you're supposed to. No losses to 3-digit RPI teams. Split Miami/Minnesota and pull off an upset over Temple or Dayton and you're looking at a banner year.

Back to ticket sales for Syracuse, I'll say attendance will be 17,500.

Cuse will try to run the ball. They'll try to keep it entirely on the ground through out the game in the hopes of wearing out our defense. But they don't realize that 1) we don't run a 3-3-5 defense any more so it won't be so easy (Anyone reading this could have run for 100 yards a game against that formation) and 2) we have far more depth than they do. Our D-line is three-deep with great talent and behind them is a linebacking corps that is tops in the MAC.

This is what you hear because you are a soccer fan. You obviously hang out with other soccer fans. Soccer fans probably make up 5% of the university. The soccer program could vanish tomorrow and 95% of the people on campus and NE Ohio for that matter couldn't care less. You and your soccer student friends talk about football being a joke because you are jealous of people not caring about your sport. 95 % of the public talks about how much a joke soccer is regardless of wins and losses. Harsh, but a fact. And this is what you think because you're not on campus. More students showed up for a pre-season scrimmage against VCU than the entire amount of students, alumni, fans, and press that attended football's open scrimmage.

With this, BYU loses their WAC scheduling arrangement and have made enemies of both local conferences (MWC and WAC). They're going to have to rely on scheduling PAC-10 and Big 12 teams, or else travel much farther than they might like. I think Tom Wistrcill (or maybe Jon Steinbrecher) needs to get on the phone and cook up a scheduling arrangement. The LDS has a relatively strong presence in the MAC footprint that BYU might want to connect with.

In a stunner, BYU has announced that it is joining the WCC (West Coast Conference, home to Gonzaga and St Mary's) in all sports and going independent in Football. This summer of playing out like a game of Chinese Checkers.

Millikin? Millikin?

I would much rather be in North Carolina than Akron this weekend, but the plans for a trip down there fell through. I'll be at the Info with everyone else.

Neither of them will be there. I'd rather have Bernie Kosar as the new radio color commentator over seeing either LBJ or Jim Brown, anyway.

I don't believe this for a minute. I don't care if we win the national title every year for a decade....people don't care about soccer. Believe whatever you want. On campus, nobody is excited about football. Might have to do with the focus on marketing being "hey, we have a new coach, but that's all we really have going for us right now". The coach's face is plastered on everything related to the team but there's almost nothing about the actual team, who they play, or any of the actual players. A great marketing tool is to create a star player (we have several in Allen, Nicely, LaFrance, Wagner, and Sewell) and show that the game is about the players and what they can do on the field. We get none of that, though.

It's tonight at 11 PM on STO. I doubt they'll talk much about Akron, considering we were picked to finish dead last in the conference.

Zips release their projected starting line-up. Wish he could have linked to it. But at least we know a few more positions. True Freshman Austin Bailey will be the starting FB, and Senior Kyle Weber is the starting TE.