GP1

Interesting. There was only one team with a worse coach than Jim Grobe and USC fired him a few weeks ago.

NIU is the best MAC team since some of the great ones in the Marshall era. NIU, Total < 69. NIU 42 BSU 24

Why not just record it and watch it when you get up? A college basketball game only last forty minutes of game clock and you can watch an entire game in less than an hour

All in all, the day was not that bad. It's all about limiting exposure to misery. Got to my seat at noon...was back at the car drinking beer with friends who didn't bother to go in at 12:56.

I think people involved in football where adults are involved are now being asked to act like adults. The players at EMU are adults and should be treated as such. The coach is being asked to act like an adult. The players and coaches for the Miami Dolphins are adults and should conduct themselves as such. The networks should treat these people as adults when they promote games and shouldn't have them jumping around like a bunch of fools. It's time for these adult children to grow up.

It would be funny if it wasn't so concerning. I'm not sure when it started to get so out of control, but the "building process" is completely out of control. Maybe I'm crazy, or maybe I'm the only sane person in a room full of crazy people, but there are a couple of arguments that take place about the "building process" at universities. Let it be known that I am a fan of taking a cab/limo from the airport to my hotel because it speeds up completion of the task of getting from the airport to the hotel. It seems to make total sense to me. I am not a fan of taking the Super Shuttle from the airport to my hotel as it can lead to too many stops between the airport and my hotel, making no sense to me at all because it requires me to do a bunch of things that don't directly help me achieve my goal. I still believe the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The first argument is the Super Shuttle argument...if we build gyms, luxury dorms, football stadiums, softball stadiums, etc. it will attract more students and will give the school more money so they can provide a better education. So basically, let's do 15 things to make one thing work. Seems to over complicate the issue to me. Ya GP1, but you still got to the hotel. That is correct; however, along the way a fat lady hit me in the head with her ass getting out of the Shuttle, the fumes made me want to throw up, I had to sit by a European guy who hadn't bathed on at least two days, my back is killing me because the shocks were destroyed on the van, the springs in the seat are poking me in a place I would rather not be poked and I missed the presentation because I had to stop at every freaking hotel along the way. The cab/limo argument. Wouldn't it be better to pour a bunch of money into the direct stream of educating people? Better labs. Better professors. Better research. Fund tuition for top notch students so they could study under these great professors doing cutting edge research. An actual building process of making education better and not building structures so presidents and ADs can put it on their resume for their next job.

Tough choice. I picked option "C" - Go to bed and don't waste another second.

I have a 5 PM flight out of CAK that afternoon. Noon start at the latest.

I disagree completely. Almost every team in America is playing that weekend. A Friday game is perfect as almost everyone is not working and sitting around the house doing nothing, with the exception of the lunatics who have not discovered the internet yet and go out to shop. Our attendance is going to be far more impacted by a four win season going into the game than anything else.

You are correct sir. A win gets us a minimum four for the season and eliminates us from another off season being recognized as a horrible program. It may not seem like it, but a win this week would be extremely meaningful. Heck, a win could give us enough momentum to beat Toledo if we have a really good day at home.

Article on subsidizing 100 year debts at universities.

In 2013, giving up seven points is officially stomping someone. The Zips held Can't to their second lowest point total of the year (0 against penn state). It was the perfect game plan for a bad team. Don't give up big plays and watch them self destruct. Teams have been doing it to us for years. It's good to see us get to do it to someone.

I've been saying it for a long time. I don't care how they do it. Pretty, ugly, average, uneventful. This team needs to win. They won today in a game they badly needed to win. Great job to everyone involved.

This post has me fired up for the game. While in Key West this weekend, I might even find some time to take in the Zips at Sloppy Joes. Maybe tie my late morning/early afternoon drinking together with some late afternoon drinking while watching a football game and let that roll into some early evening drinking followed by some late night drinking. Go Zips!

Ouch! Will this set a MAC record for worst (Announced Crowd : Actual Butts In Seats) ratio in league history? A record breaking day!

Zips opponents this season are a combined 49-21 (70%) Subtract the Miami 0-8 record and the remainder is 49-13 (79%) Every team with the exception of Miami has a winning record with the lowest winning percentage being 62% credited to JMU and Bowling Green. JMU 5-3 Borderline playoff team. Another loss would keep them out for sure. La Laf 5-2 first place in their division in the Sun Belt OU 6-2 Tied for second in MAC East UCF 6-1 Contender for whatever league they are in now. Michigan 6-1 Contender for Big Ten Championship and second place in their division Ball State 8-1 Tied for first in MAC West Bowling Green 5-3 Tied for second in MAC East NIU 8-0 Tied for first in MAC West Miami 0-8 Yikes! Better them than us. Other than Miami, there isn't a D-1A team on our schedule sitting lower than second place in their respective division. 87.5% of our games are against teams with winning records. That number will at worst go down to 83.3% by the end of the year. Here is my question. Is there a service out there that ranks strength of schedule for only MAC schools? I have to believe our SOS would be the most difficult in the MAC. There is no quit in this team. They continue to compete against very difficult odds.

Just for the record, JMU has a winning record. We are 1-0.

Great post Balsy!! You are correct about outsiders. Friends of mine in South Carolina roll their eyes when they hear of him working for UofA. He is only respected in a state littered with punch drinkers. It was an absolute move of desperation. Nobody outside of Ohio takes the guy seriously and I worry about the amount of ball busting I'm going to have to take if he is hired as President. People in South Carolina aren't even stupid enough to think that hiring Tressel as University President is a good idea. I have no idea what has happened to Ohio/UofA since I move away, but I worry that a group of rum-dums in Myrtle Beach may be smarter than the Trustees at UofA. UofA's problems are not academic. It is a great academic institution. Far better than when I was in school and it was very good then. I'm a huge believer in the quality of education UofA provides. The problem is they have set the goal to allow more students in, in order to support the "building process". They will say otherwise, but it takes money to support the playgrounds they have built. This means more students at the bottom of the intellectual ladder. These students almost never make it into the higher intellectual majors, but they bring averages down. In greater numbers, they bring averages down even more. If the image of UofA is a community college, it is the image of those who aren't paying attention or like many in Ohio, want to hold on to the past forever. Tressel is the past so they will want to hold on to whatever greatness they think the University can pull out of a football coach who is suspended from coaching in the NCAA. It's shockingly stupid.

Are they the same "high ups" who have given us the building process that has resulted in a decline in enrollment, low graduation rate, an empty football stadium as a result of their AD hire who hired his friend to destroy the football program? If so, we should do the opposite of what they want and be successful.

Because he is qualified to do one of those jobs and not the other. If the choice is Tressel going to coach at Miami or becoming the President at UofA, I say enjoy the night life in Oxford coach.

I'll go at this again. While we have done nothing to deserve favorable treatment from the Conference and have only our AD to blame for the current condition of the program, I hope the MAC treats us a little better next year. I hope our AD goes into the Conference meetings and lobbies for a little more favorable schedule. We deserve it after, like you said, drawing NIU, BSU and Toledo. Scheduling is critical to gaining momentum in a program/season. We need the MAC to get off of our throats.

My wife made a good point about osu football. If you watch games and fans closely, you see it. Everything is very contrived at osu games. There is very little spontaneous behavior and there are too many people wearing some sort of costume to games. Grown men dressing like idiots is a contrived behavior. Even though it is contrived and leaves a bit of a bitter taste after watching the nonsense, while one watches it, it looks nice. Which brings me back to what my wife called osu. She called them the Cheesecake Factory of college football. Everything looks nice, but there is a huge layer of phoniness around it that non punch drinkers see right through. People outside of Ohio see right through it.

One of the things I'm sort of following is how the Zips do in "winnable" games. These are games in which the Zips have a punchers chance. Games that prove the talent is at least enough to win some MAC games after this idiot ran off any talent the program had (How his sidekick in idiocy still has a job at UofA as AD is mind boggling, but I don't want to get in to that discussion right now). The winnable games, in my opinion, were/are: JMU, Miami, BSU (home game with some momentum after a win made it winnable yesterday), Can't State and Mass. The Zips are now 2-1 in winnable games. The Zips can win against Can't State this week and Mass after that. Four wins is still an achievable goal. If we win these games, we have officially moved ourselves from the bottom of the MAC and transformed the program from being terrible (0-3 wins) to just plain bad (4-5 wins) while being on the upswing. Going 2-1 at worst is critical to the future of this program. It's hard to get good players to come to your school when you are "terrible". Bad and on the upswing is a lot easier. It's all about getting better players. Now, go out there and win these winnable games. It starts with beating those morons at Can't State.

What if he isn't sorry? I would suggest having the "don't be a dick" conversation and a couple of laps around the track after practice...the administrators who though it would be a good idea to suspend him could join him on the run. I'm 44 and I grew up in a nice small town with a good mid sized high school full of mostly kids from working class families. Nonsense like this story would have never happened because the administrators weren't so stupid and problems were handled by actually educating kids about behaving better. This kid gets a four day suspension for writing an "offensive" bad poem? Good grief...when I was growing up, the most you could get for getting into a fight on school grounds was a three day suspension. You could take three cracks from the paddle for every one day of suspension. Or, you could take 10 days of detention for every one day of suspension. The punishment was up to the student and there were choices. This "poem" wouldn't even have been detention worthy.

So would an overreaction by the administration to this bad poem. A four day suspension would be proper for a poem this bad would be understandable...probably more. The problem was the overreaction by the school's administration. The only people who should feel offended by this "poem" are those who had to read it; and more so, people who are able to write poetry for living. If the dean of students would have just brought this bad poet in and had a "don't be a dick" conversation with him, we wouldn't be talking about this today.