UAZippers

The women's basketball team just released an article on all of their signees with individual profiles of each on Twitter, so I am sure that the men are about to follow suit. I am not sure what led to this delay though.

Dambrot just sent this out. I know Eric Parrish signed yesterday, but does anyone know who else would have?

Its certainly true that our program is still not at a totally solid spot. We are better than 5 years ago, but I don't believe that anyone can yet call us a "good" MAC team. The question is should we be at a better spot than we currently are? I remember when Bowden was first hired he mentioned multiple times that you can pretty accurately judge a coach by his second and third year with his new team. He said by year two the team should have a better record and year three they should be significantly better and in a spot to compete. In Bowden's second year we had the improved record with four more wins than the year prior, but then year three we said the same with a second consecutive 5-7 tally. Some could argue that there was improvement in the third year, as we beat a pretty good Pitt team on the road and were 4-2 before falling apart down the stretch. Of course, we continued on to get our first ever bowl win the next year. So are we at a spot that we should be happy with our football program? I don't know. It is certainly interesting to look at a WMU team that was 1-11 in the first year that Fleck was brought on board. You could argue that WMU was a better team before Fleck than Akron was before Bowden, but there is no denying that he took that team to a whole new level in four years. The fact is that our team still has not shown the ability to consistently beat teams with a winning record and occasionally loses to really bad teams. Bowden is signed through the end of next season. I believe that we should be happy to give him the rest of his tenure, but start taking a hard look throughout 2017. I am personally still hopeful of Bowdenball's future at Akron, but I do not have the rock solid faith that I had before this season.

Reddit.com/R/cfbstreams has a topic on the game. I got the first link to work, but obviously use these at your own risk.

Quite a lot. I know when I don't know what to watch, I go to Netflix and WatchESPN well before I start flipping channels.

This game isn't technically part of our midweek agreement with ESPN. The official MACtion midweek games don't start until November. This game is just a set up so that our schedule can be aligned to allow us to play on Wednesday next week. Most of the time this would have been our bye week in the season, but for some reason it didn't work out that way this year.

To be bowl eligible, all that matters is that you get to 6 wins. With so many bowls, it is very unlikely that a 6 win team will not go bowling this year. It is actually pretty likely that there will not be enough teams to fill the bowls again. If that happens, they fill the bowls with 5 win teams based on academic performance.

The good news is that OU lost to EMU today. While we are not taking a step forward in claiming the MAC East, we are at least not falling behind.

Ruining Kato's chance at a redshirt might the worst thing that Bowden can do in this game. We are already going to get killed, why take a year off of one of our most promising young players? That being said, I would like to see Hoyer get some playing time. He can't be much worse that TC and, after last week, his teammates obviously love seeing him get on the field.

So because WMU is in the MAC, that means that they cannot be a legitimate top 25 team? I think it is very fair to compare WMU and MSU. If they played each other, I would expect a really close game. At this point, we are an upper-level MAC team, but WMU is a premier G5 team. It is certainly not impossible for us to win Saturday, and it has been years since I have been this excited for a home game, but I think a double digit spread makes perfect sense to a nonpartisan odds-maker.

George Thomas just posted on Twitter that Marcus is done for the season. I'm on my phone or I would directly post the tweet.

Thanks for this great post. I can tell that you put a lot of time and thought into it. There has been a lot of talk on this forum about the Rowdies leadership (or lack thereof). I would like to give my perspective. I am a current student who was on the Rowdies board for the past two years, including being the president for the 2015-16 school year. Looking back, there are absolutely some things that I would have done differently, but there is a serious misunderstanding of what the Rowdies are and what they are meant to be. First, the Rowdies are NOT the student marketing department for athletics. Athletics has their own employees that are paid to get students to games. The Rowdies are a group that work to make sporting events fun for its own members. Because everyone has a better time when there are a lot of people at a game, the Rowdies have volunteered to help the marketing staff when they can, but as Zach said, the Rowdies board consists of students who are not paid and are being stretched in 100 different directions on a given day. My board last year included a student in the process of applying for grad school, a student on the leadership board of his frat, a student doing her first semester of lab work, and a student who started a new student org during her first semester in college. All of these responsibilities were much higher on their list of priorities than the Rowdies and I don't blame them in the slightest. My big goal of the past year was to get other student orgs involved with the gameday experience. The biggest example of this was with our football tailgates. We wanted to have different Greek groups cosponsor the tailgates. All they had to do was get their students to come out and bring a couple 12 packs of pop. In return, the Rowdies would supply all of the food, music, and games.We had at least 1 frat and 1 sorority sign up for each tailgate, maybe 4 showed up all year. The frat that a board member belonged to was the only one to have more then 5 members come. If any of you have recommendations that the Rowdies haven't tried, I've yet to see one on this forum, please let me know. I will be happy to pass it along to this year's board. As far as I know, I'm the only former Rowdie board member around that still visits ZipsNation.

I agree wholeheartedly with "innocent until proven guilty", but you would think that a guy that has been wrongly accused of murder would be extra careful to not put himself in any situation that could be taken the wrong way. Either he has the worst luck in the world, or Mr. Bell did something wrong here. That being said, I believe he absolutely should play until he is found guilty, or at least until enough evidence is presented against him that Bowden feels comfortable making a decision.

Wow am I tired of these posts at the start of every game. We may or may not come back, but it would be nice if we had one game where the sky wasn't falling 5 minutes into the first quarter according to Zips fans.

I'm pretty sure that it will be on ESPN3.

As the only Carson Wentz voter in the poll, I am very happy to accept my award.

I can't believe that the other members of the MAC East have 3 FCS losses and a 1 point FCS win on a missed 2-point conversion at the end of the game. Nobody is 2-0. We will never have a weaker division.

The head referee has since admitted that CMU should not have been given that final play. CMU got lucky, not that I'm complaining. MACtion!

I'll throw my opinion into the ring here. I think Wisconsin is going to win by multiple touchdowns. My guess is that UW takes an early lead and never gives it up. I do not think it will be a blowout, but UW will never really feel scared that they might lose. The Zips are just too inexperienced to keep up with an upper level P5 team at this point in the season. Score: 38-21

I agree that our defense and special teams left a whole lot to be desired, but I was quite pleased with our passing game. I think Woodson looks like he really is ready to take the next step and be a great MAC quarterback. After his first play fumble, Natson was everything that he was hyped to be and Lane picked up right where he left off. Obviously, the talent on the other side of the ball only goes up from here, but this was a great building block in that phase of the game. Side note, Chapman looked awful in his few attempts at the end. It seemed like every throw was 5-10 yards away from his receiver. We need Woodson to stay healthy.

According to my understanding, it depends on the 4-man front. Some have a balanced d-line where both DTs are lined up somewhere across from the offense's guard. The scheme that we use has a DT lined up between the guard and tackle on the strong side of the ball and a NT lined up between the center and the guard on the weak side. In this scheme it is correct to differentiate the DTs from the NTs.

This is the exact article that UA football has needed for years. Connecting the Zips to the greater community can only help in every facet of the organization. Especially important is the quotes from the local coaches. Getting on a coaches good side tends to do wonders for recruiting.

Not really any new info to be learned, but Hustle Belt has a short interview with Mr. Lugo about his commitment. Link to article

Shawn didn't look like himself all night. Now there is only 4 more years until his gold medal!

They had a recruiting drive just the other day, so I highly doubt that they will be disbanded any time soon.