ZachTheZip

Just stopped by Quaker Square to see how the new student population is affecting it. That place has a lot of potential, but has filled none of it. The Pie Factory will have very long lines for the forseeable future, but that's because it's just about the only thing there. Any enterprising soul would stand to make a lot of money if they opened up a shop there now. The students are starving for convenience, and it's a 15 minute walk to get anywhere from there.

Good thing our RPI will rise and CMU's will fall before then. Playing a team with a 100+ RPI will do us about as much good as Austin Peay did last year. When we're the HOME team, we should get a tougher RPI opponent, not a weaker one.From this list (which is very good for figuring out the home/away teams), Wright State, Creighton, or Niagara is who I expect to be playing.

We demolish it and use it for the downtown basketball/hockey arena.

I was at a celebration all day yesterday, so I missed most of the game, but for the parts I could hear on the radio, I heard the Akron fans drowning out the whole arena. Great job guys. I thought that this game would be a toughie. We historically have problems at Buffalo. For some reason we have a hard time winning there. I'm glad that we pulled out a win because I really really want to get the MAC regular season title so we don't have to worry about being in the postseason.

http://www.ohio.com/sports/13744947.html No mention of John Buddenberg.

Any thoughts about the game? This has all the makings of a trap game, coming after two very tough, emotional games. We have historically sucked playing at Buffalo. Hopefully the large contingent of AK-Rowdies making the trip will even the odds a bit.

We will lose alot of our home-court advantage if a new downtown arena doesn't follow the bandbox design. Having the fans removed from the action kills their effectiveness.

The first part of the project is already underway. On the corner of Brown and Power Street they tore down an entire block and have begun laying the foundation of Spicer Village. I believe they will use that as a base to expand block by block buying up condemned propertied as they come.

Word is that Jacobs Field is now called Progressive Stadium. First the Gund, and now this. I hate this crap. I bet that if a story was ran a year ago telling the public that this would happen, they could have put together a drive to keep another stadium from selling itself out to a corporation. At least Browns Stadium is safe for the moment.

The webcast you watch is just what they show on the jumbotron during the game. You see what the fans see in the JAR when they look at the screen.

Delayed again. I can't wait until they start demolishing things, though. Should be fun to watch.

There will be ZERO tax dollars put into it whatsoever. What ever isn't being paid by name sponsors or donations will be paid with bonds. I'd rather have a clean stadium that is financed using bonds than one covered with every brand-name imaginable with a sponsor for every drinking fountain and doorknob.

This is a great thing. Chances are that the fieldhouse has everything to do with them coming here. It's a great way to show off the campus to the best HS athletes around. I doubt it'll change any of the players' minds, but they may pass along a reccomendation to their teammates or something.

Home court advantage is much bigger in basketball. At the JAR, the fans are only three feet away from the court, which means the players can hear individual taunts directed at them. Everything is magnified, including crowd noise because it is indoors.

Skip-zip, scheduling better is not the same as scheduling tougher. Let me show you what I mean. The Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, or the MEAC, scheduled the 2nd toughest schedule, collectively, in the country. They lost most of their games, but got your beloved "exposure" by playing a vast majority of their games on the road against "Major" conference teams. Their conference RPI was somewhere around 18 of 32. Then conference play started, and after only one week of it, the entire conference dropped to 25th in RPI and 11th in SOS. The reason for that is because they have the same mindset as you: scheduling tougher opponents to boost the RPI via the SOS factor regardless of the impact that has on the win/loss total. They are now stuck playing ALL sub .500 teams for the rest of the year, and that will ruin their individual SOSs and kill any chance they had of an at-large. Had they scheduled less road games against top opponents, and given themselves a chance to win more games, they would be in a much better position once the conference schedule is over.We're in the same boat with the MAC, although to a lesser extreme. We're stuck playing a bunch of loser teams for the rest of the year because they overscheduled. A win over Akron will look a lot better than a win over Miami because of the fact that the RECORD COUNTS TWICE AS MUCH AS THE STRENGTH OF SCHEDULE when you play an opponent. I would rather play a 11-3 team with a weak SOS than a 6-7 team with a top-10 SOS any day because of that reason.Conference play should INCREASE our strength of schedule, not cause it to plummet. The only way to do that is to have the other MAC teams have winning records OOC, and the only way that will happen is when they stop scheduling above their level.

...and it certainly didn't help us get an at-large bid to ANY post-season tournament.We were in the best position to get one out of any team in the MAC. All the other teams that preached "tougher schedules" were in worse shape than us. It seems to me that KDs plan worked the best out of the different MAC team scheduling philosophies.Look at the current RPI conference standings. The MAC is ranked 13th with an SOS of 6. The MWC is ranked 10th with an SOS of 18th. They get it. They will have good records when they play eachother in conference games, and the RPI is 50% your opponents records. If all the teams in the MAC had .500+ records, even against lesser competition, once we played each other those records would raise the RPI of every team in the conference. Instead, we get to play teams like Toledo, who played the #1 non-conf schedule, but was only 4-8 OOC. Their 4-8 record counts twice as much as their SOS when you play them.The RPI is 25% your record, 50% your opponents record, and 25% your opponents' opponents' records. The MAC conference schedule is longer than the non-conference schedule, so the entire conference should focus on getting wins before they play eachother, because the formula counts your opponents records much more than your opponents SOS. If the MAC played a weaker schedule but had more wins, the conference would improve in the RPI as the MAC season wore on because of all the winning teams you are now playing. That's how the big conferences do it, they have it figured out. Instead, the MAC sees the RPI before the conference starts, when it is still being carried by the SOS, and then scratches their heads when it plummets during conference play because we are forced into playing a bunch of losing teams.

Might I remind you all that we had an equally bad SOS last year, but still ended on top of the MAC RPI by nearly 20 spots? The stronger schedules didn't help those teams whatsoever.

Apathy is a bigger killer than hatred. Believe me, you get more confused looks when you say that you don't care one way or the other about OSU than if you say you hate them. For them, OSU is the center of collegiate athletics, and it is incomprehensible for them to see a person who just doesn't care about them but cares strongly about another team. It really messes with their black&white perception of you either have to love or hate them.

If I'm not mistaken, Butler has a home Bracketbuster this year, so we will not play them. I'm thinking a team like St. Marys would be nice.

The reason this loss is good is because 90% of OSu's fans are frontrunners in the truest sense, including all the local media outlets. They cover OSU above Akron despite the close proximity. I have no doubt that if the local media gave both schools even coverage, that you would see a significant increase in Akron fans around here because they only root for who the news tells them to root for. This loss causes some people to be disenchanted, and we're in a very convenient place to pick up the slack, especially in basketball.

Re-building my gaming rig. Nothing beats the smell of thermal paste and melted electronics.

Simple, their students care about their school, and keep that care once they graduate, turning into donors. Ours pretend they're OSU grads, and completely forget about UA once they get their diploma. More than 50% of UA students would rather be going to another school, but either can't afford it or their academics weren't good enough. That's the problem with being an open enrollment school, you get all the people who resent not being smart enough to go somewhere else.

Great idea! No go out and find the boosters. We can't fund what we do now. It is going to take more than a few boosters to get the Athletic Department to where it needs to be.We have very few boosters at UA. Ovbiously we have a few big donors (that we're EXTREMELY grateful for) that are responsible for things like the Field House, Stadium, and much of the greenspace on campus, but that's about it. We can't expect them to carry coaches' salaries as well. Mack Rhoades has said that when he first came here, he saw the sorry state of the donation base, and tried to use nostalgia to grow it. He asked the alumni "Don't you remember back in college that feeling that you would get on game day being on campus?" They responded that they had no feelings about it, because there were no gamedays on campus to begin with. They were all at a concrete hole in the ground, 5 miles off campus. Not to mention the fact that there was really nobody on campus for the basketball games because we were a commutter school.That's changing, though. UA has more students living on campus than ever before, and we're getting a football stadium, and EJ Thomas hall is going to start catering to student-oriented entertainment instead of the more artsy, but less popular, theatre stuff. They're getting involved with campus life. We have fan sections now. The only thing is, the real benefit of all this won't be seen for a few decades once the current students are graduated and out there making money. There is no quick fix for our problems. Everything will have to be done the hard way.

Realmedia, the company behind Realplayer, went out of business.

If he continues to play like Saturday, we can call him McMVP.....We probably would, if Nate Linhart didn't already have the MVP title locked up. Nate has earned it, though, after shutting down the best players on each team we face. If you noticed, every team we played had their top player off their game, forcing them to rely on others. Nate is a big part of that.