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VAZip

Not much to figure out. It's the same 2-3 every play. You just have to be disciplined in the way you attack it. Luckily for us, we have a beast that we can post at the foul line and can pass the ball.

Yes, I agree it's probably very few. But I had an interesting experience at one of our trips to the First Round NCAA Tourney games when one of those crazy brass bands from a southern historically-black school was playing all night. It was unlike anything I had ever heard. During the intermissions, everyone stopped and watched, and an arena-wide applause followed. I think they can be good enough to entertain fans. I think they sometimes help to get the juices flowing with the crowd too. But I would be surprised to find that there's any evidence that they impact the gate receipts in any significant way.

Am I missing something? These 3 entities have Pep Bands? If so, I've never noticed.

Maybe you're now solidly justified in that thought. I mean, this is a team that needed overtime, at home, to beat Daemen College a couple of months ago. And they lost their first 2 HOME conference games. But in the last couple of week, they pushed us to the limit at home, and followed that with 3 wins in a row in convincing fashion. Unless something happens to change my mind, I have that game ranked as our #1 chance to get another regular season loss, and our #1 threat for a MAC tournament title.

Maybe your recollection of the actual sequence was better than mine.

We moved up to #39 in the RPI. I think that's now the highest spot this year, and we've moved 10 spots in the last week. We're one of the few top teams that's had a "double arrow" upward movement this week. Nice to see that we've erased the losses from the OU game, and then some.

i wonder if "getting healthy" is even the issue anymore. He started playing again a week ago. Here's what I'm seeing: Keith has already talked in interviews about how much he likes Poke's defense. He's even shown enough confidence in him to switch Big Dog and Poke on offense/defense at the end of close games. He even talked last night about how much better he'll be next year with another 15 lbs. I think it could very well be that playing Big Dog for 32 and Poke for 8 might be how he is choosing to play the 5 Spot for right now. And this doesn't change my mind about Mike's potential to still help us this year. But I really believe that Keith is just going with the guy who he feels is the better option right now.

When just about any D-1 team that shoots a lot of 3-balls hits 52% they are probably going to win easily. But something else really got my attention last night. It's the 22 Assists vs. 9 Turnovers. We really played team basketball last night, and only went through a rough patch when we surrendered that double digit lead right before halftime. I got the feeling last night that once Kwan started shooting well, everyone stated hitting. I actually can't believe that I am implying that when Kwan starts hitting long balls, he gives everyone else more confidence that they can do the same. And I still can't believe that he has the green light from 30' out. But what can a coach do when they go in?

Have you read some of my previous posts in this thread alone? 4th post on this page. And 7th post on this page. For example. I'm complaining about all of the excuses. Correct.

VCU's conference for the last few years has a ranking of 8th Their previous conference is ranked 11th The MAC is having a bad year, and is still ranked 14th. Nobody has anything to brag about here, despite the "vast" difference you extol. Neither is in a power conference either. So, are we just continuing to look for more excuses?

I said I'd take 1/4 of that. I knew that more excuses would be forthcoming. They made a tournament run 7 years ago. We're all sitting here as a conglomerate of the most avid fans of the Akron Zips, and some keep making excuses instead of acknowledging that we have a disconnect with our students and athletics. With football, some say that we just need to have a winning team. With basketball, the same people come here and say that winning isn't enough. We could come up with solutions here. But we won't as long as some people deny that Akron has a problem.

Virginia Commonwealth: 24k Undergraduate Enrollment City School No long, rich sports history. Basketball success over the last 10 years. Seems like nearly a mirror image of Akron? Yet, if we had 1/4 of this volume of student involvement right now, I'd be happy. Oh that's right, I forgot. "College students today are too busy, and don't go to basketball games"

NO kidding. That's what I thought too. I'm pissed

If that's the case, I'm truly saddened. Really pathetic. Thanks for sharing this information. EDIT: Then I have another idea. Give those wrist bands out to ANYONE who wants a damn floor seat. I bet there are some of us in our 50's and 60's who would really have fun hanging out with the Rowdies for a game. And we aren't going to care if they are part of the "cool crowd" or the "uncool crowd"

And they are clearly the most visible when there are 10 of them, and the other 50 blue seats around them are empty.

Can someone fill us in on the current policy on this? If "other students" can go sit in those lower end-basket seats, why isn't this happening? I'm sure most of them would gladly exchange their nose-bleed seats for a seat near the floor. Maybe this sounds too logical, but here's my proposal. 1) Give priority to the Rowdies and let them claim their number of seats prior to the game. And for God's sake, let them all do whatever they want. If the Freshman want to have their own "theme night", who gives a damn. 2) Let the rest of the students come to some location prior to the game and claim the rest of the lower-bowl end seats until they run out. Give out the remainder at the student entrance, if there are any left. And once again. let them do whatever the hell they want to do also. Does this make sense? I'm sure we can easily fill 100 damn student floor seats every game.

I see the remainder of the season this way: Games that pose the biggest threat to pick up another loss: 3) @ EMU 2) @ Kent 1) @ Buffalo Get by this one, and there's only 2 left. We only shot 26% from 3-point range the first time around against these guys. Come on Zips, make this the night we get back on track shooting to ball from long range, and it will be a nice enjoyable ride back from Ypsi.

No need to have a debate over how interested today's college students might be about going to their school's basketball games, vs. years ago. But kids are definitely still going to basketball games. I'm sorry. We have a school with 26,000 students. And I see 10 of them standing and making noise in the corner near the baskets. That's unfathomable. Regardless of the cause, that has to change. What would it take? Maybe 100 kids to fill those two small sections and still leave enough room for the band? I'll do the math. That's .0003% of the student population. There's no excuse that covers that. There's a multitude of easy ways to get that accomplished for the last few home games, and I bet nobody will do it.

Me too.

Maybe this is the down side of having an organized student group. You end up knowing these people. You decide if you want to be seen with them based on whether they are cool or uncool. When we gathered in the bleachers back in the mid-80's, we'd see the same people all the time, but we didn't really know them. We didn't care if they were part of the cool crowd or not. We were together for 2 hours a couple of days a week to yell at officials, harass opponents, and make noise because we had just all been consuming tons of cheap canned beer. Don't college kids just want to take a break from schoolwork and get out and have a little fun anymore? it really matters that much if they think its a "cool group" or an "uncool group"? It's a basketball game.

I think I may have mentioned this already, but Keith has said on several occasions that the Friday games mess up his preferred weekly/daily agenda, which would include the Saturday morning walk-thru on game days.

Seems like we might have some John Blutarsky types hanging around? At least John was cool and was looked up to as a leader. If this is keeping the Rowdies Organization from expanding right now, then it needs to be addressed.

The blame goes to the fact that we have 20 rabid students sitting behind the baskets today, instead of the hundreds that we had waiting to get those floor-level seats a few years ago. Not the configuration of the Arena. In my day, we ALL sat in the bleachers, and we still made plenty of noise. Watch the clip again of the ending of that game on Tuesday. The noise was unbelievable. If all of those students you reference who are sitting in the bleachers were paying attention to the game instead of playing on their phones all night, we can have a good atmosphere for more than just the final play of the game.