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I can actually see where you are coming from. It could be interpreted as an admission of jealousy. Fortunately, that isn't the case. I mean it wholeheartedly. Everything about Can't sucks. Their students, president, campus, and most all, their football team. Your point is still taken. On the flip side, Can't's indifference has less to with superiority than it does pure apathy. Their most popular majors are fashion design and other artsy fartsy BS. The students at Can't State will never care about football. It just isn't in their culture. That's why there isn't a Can't-Rowdies. That's why there is no "flushnation.org", just some crappy site hosted(and paid for) by the NCAAbbs people. With the fan base we have already(a good number of people followed to watch the zips in the 2005 MC Bowl) then imagine how the culture will grow as the on campus community grows. On campus housing has doubled since 2000. In that time frame we have seen the emergence of devoted student(and alumni) support that's never been witnessed before in Akron. Someone tell me how the MAC basketball championship would have looked ten years ago? Akron wouldn't be there and you can bet that if they somehow made it to Saturday then you would see half the support you saw this winter. Most of the flush fans on NCAAbbs dismiss Akron as a commuter school with no residential culture. That just isn't true. Proenza has expressed plans to build room for as much as 4000-5000 students on campus. This would put Akron on par with just about anyone in the MAC. it would also make us the largest school in the MAC by a long shot(when you combine that with the non-residential pop, obviously). I'm excited for the future, and the rest of zips nation should be as well. Let's win some games, support the team and the 'marketing' will work itself out. Please tell us where you see this unprecedented upswing in fan support? Did I miss something this past year? We had just as much, or more fan interest in basketball 20-25 years ago than we have now. And if we had made it to a MAC basketball title game 10 years ago, many of the same people would have been at that game as well. To think that half of the people would have been at a MAC title game 10 years ago is just ridiculous, in my opinion. But...I sure hope that the increased campus involvement will eventually flow over to our athletic venues as well.

I think you are forgetting the talent level that Ronnie Steward was/is on. If i remember correctly, Ronnie was the starting point guard OVER Humpty at the beginning of the 2008-2009 season. I was also led to believe that Ronnie would be our "offensive quarterback" after the departure of Dru. I think that only the injuries sidelined those plans. And he was quite the decorated HS player. But looking ahead, even with Humpty gone, he still would have likely been playing minimal minutes compared to Darryl and Steve again, and possibly a newly acquired PG...and maybe that was enough for him. Lets not forget Sullivan also. This was a guy who was a decorated and solid mid-20s per game scorer both of his last two years of high school....for a big school. In my opinion, when you have a situation like that....where that kind of talent sits for 2 full years...without even a chance to prove himself besides his impressive play during a scrimmage before last season, you are going to have little chance of keeping him around. I wish he could have had the patience to stick around until after Steve and Darryl graduated...but I'm guessing he just wanted to play, and play as quickly as possible. Humpty? I never made it a secret that I was never sold on him ever developing into much more than what we saw.....a spark-plug kind of player who could generate some offense on some nights, but also quite frequently could do the types of ill advised things that put you right back on the bench.

I know what you're thinking, but please note how I put "experienced" into that equation. In my opinion, that leaves only two true guards who are really capable of running the team, have had any real extensive playing time, and know the system. I hope the new guys step up really quick, and that we see more contribution from McClanahan.

Gotta wonder if Ronnie would have stayed had this transpired sooner. Good luck to Humpty. Fun to watch and a really nice guy to talk to. I was thinking the same thing. Or Sullivan, for that matter. That is, if in both cases, they tranferred purely because of playing time issues. Suddenly, we're not so deep and experienced at guard anymore.

I'll show my age when I say that I was one of the fortunate ones who got to witness our transition from Memorial to the JAR. I do hate to see it go, but progress is progress. On A Side Note.....thinking about Memorial is maybe the reason why I am one of the people who isn't quite as boisterous about the negatives of JAR Arena. We made great progress as a program by building the JAR. Yes, some things should have been done better. And yes, it probably doesn't meet up to the standards of what we feel we need today to be a big time basketball program. But, let's not lose site of the fact that the JAR represented a big step forward for our basketball program just a couple of decades ago. I don't think it should be viewed as a Rubber Bowl type of situation.

Basketball is a winner, statistically. But in the world of mid-major basketball (Note: Not "Major"), we aren't. Quality mid-majors beat us like a drum. We won 24 games last season, but it was a toothless tiger. We lost to VCU by double digits...got smoked by K.e.n.t. twice...lost at home in the CBI, not to mention following up our NCAA tourney appearance by blowing a 15-point home, late-2nd half lead to Austin Peay. Losing to Rhode Island, Texas A&M and NC State...gheezus... I spoke to someone high-up in UA athletics at the Wisconsin Green Bay game (you can probably figure it out because there were only about 12 people in attendance). That person also said "I can't figure out why more people don't come to basketball games...the team wins?" Coming from this person, that scared the sh!t out of me. We had a sh!tty 24-win basketball season last year, and "yes," such a thing is possible. And obviously Dambrot knows that he's gotta up his level of play. Hence the massive (by Dambrot standards) player turnover we've witnessed in the aftermath of 2010. Soccer had a special run, and they needed to bring in temporary bleachers to accommodate the fans...and there still weren't enough seats at year's end. Joe Akron exists. Basketball is the #2 winning sport, record-wise, at UA. And there is a laundry list of reasons why it doesn't draw fans (facilities, marketing, etc.). But pointing to a 20-win cake walk schedule and looking aghast at the JAR attendance...like LeBron, that one-time-out-of-50 that he shoots a lay up and doesn't get a foul call...is crazy. It's as plan as the nose on your face. All the Zips need to do is find 2,000 butts in the seats per game and the JAR is full. That should be easy. I saw 5,200 people watch the UA/K.e.n.t. game, and only about 300 were K.e.n.t. fans. Joe Akron is there. Just quit laying egg on his face. Quit blowing a tire and losing a fan belt every time the bandwagon exceeds 35MPH. And back to football -- 3k in attendance @ the JAR is equivalent to 14k at InfoCision. If the Zips football team won 7 or 8 games, they'd draw a "real" 13k. If anything, Joe Akron is consistent. It's up to Ianello to prove that. I agree with some of what you are saying. But, the highlighted area is all the proof that anyone should need about Joe Akron. Does anyone really believe that thousands more people in Akron suddenly became soccer fans? Or, that they just wanted to be associated with someone who was winning games? They started showing up because we were accomplishing something that had NATIONAL significance. We can't ever put this label on basketball or football. You are close... Basketball DOES need to do something of National Significance. But it doesn't need to be a "Butler" or a "Zips soccer" Final Two game. Just start beating some respected teams, and back it up the following year. Build something meaningful. OU beat Georgetown in the NCAA's. We need to accomplish something similar, or we're not catching Joe Akron's fancy. 15,000 people showed up @ Ford Field to see a barely-over-.500 Zips football team play Memphis. That's all the proof you need that Joe Akron will show up, if you give him a decent reason. Whether it's basketball or football...we can't back up our success. We either sink back into the abyss...or continue at a "decent" level. "Decent" is certainly better than "The Abyss," but neither will pack the house. Nor should it. There are too many other entertainment options out there today to expect people to pack the house for losing football, or Malone basketball beat-downs. I agree. I didn't mean to imply that achieving something of national significance = a national championship run.

Basketball is a winner, statistically. But in the world of mid-major basketball (Note: Not "Major"), we aren't. Quality mid-majors beat us like a drum. We won 24 games last season, but it was a toothless tiger. We lost to VCU by double digits...got smoked by K.e.n.t. twice...lost at home in the CBI, not to mention following up our NCAA tourney appearance by blowing a 15-point home, late-2nd half lead to Austin Peay. Losing to Rhode Island, Texas A&M and NC State...gheezus... I spoke to someone high-up in UA athletics at the Wisconsin Green Bay game (you can probably figure it out because there were only about 12 people in attendance). That person also said "I can't figure out why more people don't come to basketball games...the team wins?" Coming from this person, that scared the sh!t out of me. We had a sh!tty 24-win basketball season last year, and "yes," such a thing is possible. And obviously Dambrot knows that he's gotta up his level of play. Hence the massive (by Dambrot standards) player turnover we've witnessed in the aftermath of 2010. Soccer had a special run, and they needed to bring in temporary bleachers to accommodate the fans...and there still weren't enough seats at year's end. Joe Akron exists. Basketball is the #2 winning sport, record-wise, at UA. And there is a laundry list of reasons why it doesn't draw fans (facilities, marketing, etc.). But pointing to a 20-win cake walk schedule and looking aghast at the JAR attendance...like LeBron, that one-time-out-of-50 that he shoots a lay up and doesn't get a foul call...is crazy. It's as plan as the nose on your face. All the Zips need to do is find 2,000 butts in the seats per game and the JAR is full. That should be easy. I saw 5,200 people watch the UA/K.e.n.t. game, and only about 300 were K.e.n.t. fans. Joe Akron is there. Just quit laying egg on his face. Quit blowing a tire and losing a fan belt every time the bandwagon exceeds 35MPH. And back to football -- 3k in attendance @ the JAR is equivalent to 14k at InfoCision. If the Zips football team won 7 or 8 games, they'd draw a "real" 13k. If anything, Joe Akron is consistent. It's up to Ianello to prove that. I agree with some of what you are saying. But, the highlighted area is all the proof that anyone should need about Joe Akron. Does anyone really believe that thousands more people in Akron suddenly became soccer fans? Or, that they just wanted to be associated with someone who was winning games? They started showing up because we were accomplishing something that had NATIONAL significance. We can't ever put this label on basketball or football.

That would certainly be a start, but honestly the basketball team has been winning for a while now and it's not like we're packing out the little ole JAR. In order to get more butts in the seats at a school like Akron it really comes down to the fact that the team has to do something significant that captures the public's imagination and makes it "cool" to be an Akron fan. The harsh reality is that we've got to somehow pull a Boise State, because winning the MAC is just not going to cut it. You're still going to get a "so what" from Joe Akron. We will never get more than a 15-20 k per game average unless we become significant in the college football world somehow, and we're a long way off from that. We're not even significant in the MAC at this point. I say some of these things all the time. But, I didn't come to this conclusion overnight. After 30 years of being a fan, from the beginning of my student days to now, I've seen every scenario possible without any major changes in overall fan support in our two major sports. Consistent winner?...we've done that in basketball in both the latter half of the 80s, and in recent years. Conference titles?....yes, we have them in both sports. I say the words "National Significance" all the time because, until OSWho relocates to another region of the country, we'll be viewed as a minor league, doesn't-matter program in either football or basketball by most of the general public....UNTIL.....we play enough of the teams they play, and eventually get to the point where we can beat some of the level of teams they play. Heck, I still even talk to people who are sports fans in the area who don't even recognize that we play in the same division as the Suckeyes. I don't even think many people view us as being much different than the Div. II and III schools in our region. We still, unfortunately, have a long way to go.

From the looks of it, we should use Branko, and only kick if the distance will be between 30 and 39 yards. Any situation other than that, and we should probably throw a hail mary into the end zone. It's bound to produce better results.

An excellent answer. What's more, all of these fine university presidents are doing a better job in their respective office than is mr. obama. And "better" is not a very difficult level to achieve, if that is the comparison.

Beautiful. Now....how much we get out of this depends on how much he decides to talk about us

The recruiting question aside.....this gives us a good picture of where we will be in a couple of years in terms of personnel. Will that be the year that Zeke becomes dominant? Will Humpty fulfill his potential? Will Nik contunue to get better? And, will Brett become more than a 5-10 min. per game bench players? These are the questions to be answered by the upper classmen on this future Zips team over the next couple of years.

It goes without saying that oftentimes prolific high school scorers just can't make the big jump to D-1 basketball. You simply don't know until you get them on the court. Coaches use as much information as they have to project these kinds of things. Sometimes they are right, and sometimes they are wrong. We see this in our own program every year. To me, this kid would be a concern because this seems like such a big jump for him. But, does he have some qualties that appear to give him the ability to make that jump? I'm sure he does, and that's why we want him here. But, will it actually happen? That's anyone's guess.

OK...I just heard something twice that I would put in the "I'll believe it when I see it" category. With Steve's experience running our offense, and entering his 5th year in the program, I find it very unlikely that a coach like ours would insert a newcomer into that roll.

Both teams/conferences in the play-in game are awarded 1 unit just like every other team in the tourney. The winner is also awarded a 2nd unit. I assume it will be the same for the additional play-in games. I might not be like everyone. But, just for the record, I have never watched a play-in game. Yet, I avidly watch as many first round games as humanly possible. My point is that I think adding a full extra round would get plenty of fan attention. I don't think just adding a few more "play in" games will do that. Lets face it, a couple more games of no-chance-of-winning-tournament vs. no-chance-of-winning-tournament has little interest to most people compared to the possibility of a full extra round of games between mid-level seeds and bottom-seeded underdogs, like the 96 team field would present.

My initial reaction is that I do not like it. Why? Because, one of the reasons I love the 1st round of the tournament is that never-ending desire to see a #16 team beat a #1, or at least make them very nervous. Now, since all of those #16 teams will have to travel to their conference tournament, play in every game, AND travel for a Tuesday night game, they will all be absolutely exhausted by Thursday when they arrive at the 1st round tournament location. Yes, as someone already stated, it does indeed create the possibility that a MAC team could slip into one of these 3 extra at-large spots. But, as of late, it has still been rare that someone in our league is good enough to get that, and did not win the MAC tournament.

Love It !!! How can we beat a team from a program that spends so much more money on athletics?

BINGO !!!!

CUSA is a million times better and would be more national exposure. They have teams all over the eastern states. Memphis would be a better rival than Can't... I don't see the possibility that a rivalry could ever develop that would reach the level of the Ken+/Akron rivalry for us. But, I do agree with you that, contrary to what some people say on here, C-USA would be a pretty good upgrade. Unfortunately, I think that any conference upgrade like that would require us to have Marshall-like football success from their MAC days, or Butler-like basketball success.

Under a new coach, a defense will be more mature early than an offense. My biggest question mark has to do with whether or not PN's accuracy has improved. Is it any better? Some guys with great arms never develop accuracy like a pitcher who can throw 100 mph but not over the plate. Good analogy. Like I've said before, it reminds me of watching Derek Anderson.

I don't recall the exact final "score", but the defense won by quite a bit. It left me wondering: Is our defense that much improved? Or, is our offense that bad? I saw a few good throws and catches, and an outstanding long run by Alex Allen in which he made a few cuts, and broke free down the sideline. Other than that, I thought I saw way too much ineffective run blocking and way too many dropped passes and throws that could not have been caught if our receivers were 12' tall. We have a lot of work to do.

Is it a surprise anymore when someone just inserts a MAC team based on past performance, previous years record, or some other criteria, and doesn't bother to really take a look any depper than that? It still makes me mad, but we see this all the time.

Wow. Although not surprised, you still are a little disappointed when it looks like it actually is "official". I agree with ZipWatcher about Ronnie. I truly thought he'd become the answer to our Dru-less point guard issue 3 years ago. Unfortunately, he's had his setbacks. But, I really thought he'd eventually work his way back. Whenever your play is limited like that for 2-3 years, it's a hard battle to return to form on any kind of short time frame. Really hate to see Alex go. Some of my old buddies who followed him in HS thought that it wasn't looking good for him when he was going to be seriously fighting for early-career playing time behind so many experienced guards coming out of his RS year. I guess they were right, but we'll unfortunately never get to see if he'd show some of the brilliance he displayed in HS, and why we recruited him. Only the solid exhibition game performance when some of our guards were out at the beginning of last season. I really wish that he would have stuck it out. After Steve and Darryl graduated this coming year, he would have clearly had more opportunities. But...it's hard for me to argue about a guy who simply just wants to play, and wants to play sooner rather than later. And geez. Swiech is such a nice kid. And a crowd favorite. But, it sure makes sense to have that scholarship to put to better use.

I'm really disappointed with the weather outlook. I've been looking at it too. I was hoping for a 55-60 degree sunny day.