ZachTheZip

So the MAC was like "Fine. No weeknight games. Instead we'll just make your rivalry game and historically best-attended game be on Black Friday. Can't have your attendance getting too high, now."

Yeah, but the song they wrote about coming back to Akron might confuse some people.

Not too bad. Like the placement of the BYE week, too.

Remember the football game where they gave away free tuition to a student? That was a great promotion that was hampered by terrible weather and a football team on a losing streak. Even with those factors, students outnumbered the rest of the fans. Now here's an idea for next season: spread it out over the entire basketball season. Every game gets you an entry. You have to swipe out of the game when you leave (no leaving at half time) for it to count. One semester of tuition costs less than most of the promotions they've been running.

One could argue that, until the end of last season, baseball hadn't really been played here for more than a decade. It's currently above melting point in Greensboro, and they have an entire day to clear the field before the series was to begin. It's supposed to be partly sunny there this weekend, too. In all, it's a weak excuse.

And we've had seven inches of snow since November.

UNC Greenboro cancelled their series vs Akron because they can't handle temperatures below 50 degrees.

Say you did promote baseball successfully. How does it help when there's only room for about 25 people to watch the home games?

Next time you get a chance, take a good look at his calf muscles. Lots of golfball-sized lumps just under the skin. I don't know how he can even walk.

I almost thought it was a prank. I kept thinking "there's no way this is a kid that just graduated high school."

Zips take 2 of 3 in Charlotte. Now 4-2 on the season. Next up the Zips continue their tour of the Carolinas with a 3-game series at UNC Greensboro next weekend, and follow that with a 3-game tournament at Coastal Carolina where they get to take a shot at Michigan and Michigan State. The UNCG series will provide a better challenge than the previous two opponents. I know Akron's pitching is up to the job. Just need to work a little on run support. Lots of baserunners being left stranded so far this season.

Better for Akron if Buffalo beats Blowing Green.

There used to be residence hall challenges. Which ever hall got the most students to show to a game won something. Don't know if they still do this.

Think about how college kids get their information. It primarily comes through their phones. Twitter and Facebook are nice, but unless you are on at the time something is posted, it gets lost in the feed and most followers of an account never see it. But send them a notification and they'll pull their phone out and check what it has to say, even in the middle of conversations or in class. I think there should be a text notification thing set up to remind students (and fans) when it's gameday. Offer to sign them up during orientation, like they do with the school closing text notifications. It's still not at the level of engagement I would like to see, but it's a step closer to active marketing. One thing that really helped get students involved in the past was that athletes, especially the men's soccer team, were approachable and made friends with the students. Too many of the athletes are insular and stick together with only their teammates and the gym rats at the Rec. Football players, especially, have a reputation on campus for doing this. When I first started high school, I didn't care for sports very much despite my family being huge Browns and Indians fans. But I made friends with some football players and went to a few games, and I was hooked.

Bottom line: to attract students to games, you need to actively engage them. Almost every marketing effort I've seen has been passive. Putting something out there and hoping that they pay attention to it just doesn't work anymore, even if you're handing out free money.

That's 20% of the total attendance for the game (3351). That's about where it should be every game.

You want to cut something, cut the number of administrative positions.

What are you talking about? The fee is to pay for the t-shirts. The leftover funds used to go towards organizing bus trips, but there are certain people at the university who have put the clamp on that because they're worse than nuns at a Catholic grade school. Nobody is charged to sit in a student section. The student section is the upper section of the JAR on the south side. No students sit there because it's easier to spread out in the GA sections where the parents of whatever toddler pageant they're doing for halftime shush them and tell them not to stand. The reason the Rowdies leadership being allowed to sit in the lower section isn't as a privilege or exclusivity, it's for control. They have taken the most enthusiastic students, set them apart from the rest so the others can't get incited, and given them something that they can threaten to take away if anybody misbehaves: a threat that happens multiple times every season.

That's because they're different sports with different circumstances. A 20-win basketball season is equivalent to an 8-win football season. The difference is that in football, people recognize that most MAC teams have had some amount of success in recent memory (going to a bowl). Success is measured differently.

What, exactly have we won? Yes, we beat the occasional power conference team, but those are always away from the JAR. We beat up on cupcakes at home, and then we beat MAC teams which doesn't mean much because most MAC teams have been awful for decades. We beat more MAC teams in the conference tournament, and then we lose in the post-season.

Depends on which version of Toledo shows up. Hopefully it's not the one that shoots lights out.

Ideally you want to have the same amount of players in your senior, junior, and sophomore classes from year to year. Freshmen class is different because of redshirting, but it should even out over time as they progress through the years. Akron graduated 25 seniors. This past season there were 28 juniors on the roster who will be seniors next season, plus one or two transfers coming in. That's more than can be replaced in a full signing class. Behind them were 21 sophomores that will be juniors. Some JUCOs are coming in as juniors to boost that number, but there's still too much fluctuation between classes. I suspect that a big reason for Bowden's reliance on unorthodox signing classes (lots of transfers coming in with different eligibility remaining, greyshirts, blue shirts, etc.) is to try and stabilize the roster between graduating classes.

Maybe Antino moves to SG. Despite having an 11-man rotation, Noah plays 30.8 minutes per game. The next highest is Pat at 24.3. That's 6.5 minutes more than anybody else on the team for Noah. How hasn't he hit a wall?

Best way to find out what you've got from your bench players is to throw them into the fire.

If Josh wants to play immediately, it will primarily be at SG with a few minutes a game at PG as a back-up. If he doesn't, he can redshirt as a PG.