ZachTheZip

NIU is routinely rated around the bottom 20% of recruiting classes, behind nearly every P5 doormat. It's like that every single year. And yet who is one of the winningest teams in the past decade? If recruiting rankings were correct, teams would never go from bad to good, or fall off the radar, because they adjust ratings based on the offers a recruit gets and that, in turn, is based on how those teams are doing right now.

Until recruiting services stop rating classes based on quantity of signees, the rankings are meaningless.

Then it can't be said to be a fluke.

https://twitter.com/MBeavenABJ/status/563771230122442752 Michael Beaven says that Lockett will sign in August. Assuming the same goes for Tupta.

I was surprised at how just little recruiting cache beating Pitt gained us.

http://goo.gl/13Iavh Careful what you post, because it is public.

I don't have the time to look into it right now, but I'm fairly certain that those sites actually rank teams classes higher than competing sites if there is an active fan community on that site. Its a trend I've noticed when reading other teams message boards, it always works out that Rivals fan bases always get better rankings on Rivals and so on.

You could also try Michael Beaven. He does a lot of HS sports stuff for the ABJ. Probably in a better position to find out.

If that's the criteria, then about a quarter the defensive fouls called on Akron under the basket this past decade should have called on the other team. Having sat behind the basket, I can't tell you how many times a blocking foul is called on a Zips defender who is established and standing vertically when the other player dribbled right into them.

Kefa Cort went the JUCO route at Nassau CC. Brandon Junk appears to remain committed. Maybe a walk-on? Couldn't say. No word at all on Josh McNeil, Joe Tupta, or Vince Lockett at the moment.

Zips fought hard for a big win over WMU today.

That depends entirely on what you consider to be this year's signing class. Do you include the newly eligible transfers that sat out last year? The greyshirts that signed last year? Bowden has this habit of signing guys, greyshirting them, and announcing for both signing classes.

Not sure, but a grey or blue shirt isn't out of the question.

The ABJ is in a really weird ownership situation. They're a significant geographical outlier for their parent company. That's a recipe for an editorial disconnect from the local population.

Unless the recruit is local, I don't see a reason for a newspaper to cover recruiting. Things change too often. You do a piece on a recruit, and a few weeks later he flips to another school and then everyone involved looks dumb.

OU has no set offensive scheme. It's all 1-on-1 stuff. A disciplined defensive team will dominate them.

They haven't updated for Ray Ray yet. As for Kefa Cort, I'm basing it on this, and this. The trouble with following high school football in the northeast is that it's a complete afterthought. Not like in the midwest or the south.

Don't forget that Can't plays in the MAC Center. It's like a Frankensteinian combination of the JAR and Memorial Hall.

Nice

Low seating angle, non-central videoboard, "cut off" on the one end with the students instead of wrapping all the way around to give it that "arena" feel, and feels way too open with the wide concourse at the top of the seats not separated by a wall.

It just means we need to take advantage of the chances we do have to beat notable teams. Never winning in the NCAA tournament is the most obvious example. We don't need to play them at home to see an interest spike, we just need to beat teams that people around the area have actually heard of and know as a good team.

And here's what a non-Zips fan would ask: "Well, what have they won, exactly?" Nobody cares that we win a bunch against MAC teams, because they know most of the MAC is garbage. Nobody cares about our OOC wins because 95% of them are also garbage. We haven't won a single NCAA tournament game, and only play one or two P5 teams per season, always away from the JAR where nobody will notice, and even then we only beat some of those teams and hardly any that people around here actually care about or pay attention to.

The Stroh looks nice because it's new. It won't age well.

Looks like it: https://twitter.com/SleeperAthletes/status/561707717925298176

Good thing we didn't lose, then.