GP1

The situation has gotten so bad, the ADs at the "big schools" don't even pretend anymore that it is about something other than money. They are absolutely deplorable people who exploit young men between the ages of 18 and 23 for their financial gain. Sickening... We all know how to boil a frog. You can't throw it in boiling water or it jumps out. You put it in cool water and gradually bring up the heat until it is dead. It's a killing process, not a building process. Once dead, it can't come back to life. That's what Presidents, with the help of their willing accomplices, the ADs, have done to college athletics. For years, they have been gradually building stadiums, coaches salaries, let's not forget ADs salaries, etc. to the point it would collapse under its own weight if they stopped pouring money into it. It's a huge monster that has to be fed and they feed it at the expense of everything else at the universities. When 60 Minutes shows up at your door, slam the door shut and don't say anything. Few stories make the people in them look good. Last night was a disgusting display of what really goes on in college athletics. It had all the elements of what is wrong. Michigan taking out a $200 million bond to finance stadium renovations. Small school going to big school to lose game and collect $500,000 while AD defends it as advertisement for the school. My guess is the idiot AD at the small school thought he could outsmart the people at 60 Minutes and make himself and his school look good...he looked like a used car salesman instead. It had a section where a star QB at a BCS school basically admitted on camera football is his full time job. It interviewed the AD at Michigan and his basic attitude was, "Screw everyone if they don't like what is going on because we are going to do what we want to do and there is nothing you can do to stop us". 60 Minutes was not good for college athletics last night and rightfully so...college athletics doesn't look very good these days.

Did you see 60 Minutes last night? 60 Minutes missed the point. It isn't about money in university athletics. It's about the ass bags that run athletic departments (ADs and President) and their putting money before anything else they do. BTW, there was a familiar ass bag who gave an answer that reinforced it is all really about money and not developing young people. When playing LSU is all about an advertisement and not developing teams, it is all about money. Terrible answer... There was a particularly sickening display of self promotion that went along with it as well. He hit the twofer.

Maybe....Probably not. Throwing caution to the wind and predicting the MAC will become a solid mid level conference in football ignores the history of the MAC and what appears to be the natural order of the Conference. In the Low Country of South Carolina, the swamps are either ebbing (water flowing out) or flowing (water flowing in). They never stay the same. Right now, the MAC is flowing. I would go as far as to say the MAC may have reached high tide. The good news for the Zips is our program SHOULD begin to flow while the remainder of the league is ebbing. Timing can be a good thing.

I think we get caught up too much in the mid major vs. major discussion in college basketball. There are so many quality mid majors, it makes the debate almost irrelevant at this point. The best case I could use to illustrate the differences is our December schedule. Would it be out of line to say almost every team we play in December would beat, or at least play a close game with PSU? I don't thin so. I'll make a prediction here. In a couple of months, we will all look at the PSU game as more of tune-up game for the December schedule than anything else. We have a very challenging December schedule and we need to be prepared.

Your post made me think of something Phil Sims said on Showtime last week about the two most important players on a team. 1. The QB 2. The back-up QB

We are a good team regardless of who we beat today. The Zips destroyed a horrible team and that is what good teams do. PSU is a horrible program. Penn State went 12-20 and 4-14 in the Big Ten last year. They are predicted to be just as bad this year. I wouldn't try to project future Zips results on today.

I wouldn't say there are ND haters per say....just haters of their obnoxious fans. In all reality, it isn't bad for ND to become relevant once every 20 years. It is a good reminder of how absolutely horrible their fans are. They are the worst of the worst. Brian Kelly has done a good job at ND. He is a good example of how far a coach will go to win. He is willing to kill a student manager in order to get video tape of a practice. If that isn't dedication and drive, I don't know what is. Roy Williams was almost put in stocks for not being the last one off the floor after another team's fans rush the court and a student manager was left behind and the last one off the court. Kelly doesn't watch out for the well being of a student manager and the ND PR machine goes in full gear protecting him. Anything to win so I guess I agree with the ND PR machine. I'd MIGHT be willing to look the other way if a student manager or two was killed if the Zips could win even 8 games. The knee jerk reaction of every ND honk reading my post is going to be to come on and defend ND and that horrible human being, Brian Kelly. In preparation for that moment, I'd just like to tell all of you to go away. If you want to discuss ND, there are plenty of websites to do that. Now, please, please, please, please, please go away.

Good post. Integration of new players goes on every year in every sport at every level. It doesn't matter if those players are freshmen or juco players. It's foolishness to believe juco players disrupt cohesion.

Absolutely. The best way to attract top notch high school talent is to win and win ASAP. So, the cycle has to break. The way to break the cycle is juco players and getting some traction while younger players develop. More than anything, this program quickly needs to get to at least four wins a year. We don't have an unlimited number of years to "build" a program.

I think you are right. Very young kids are not able to fully understand and commit to muscle memory the lessons of how to as safely as possible play football. They also are not able to learn much at that age that is useful for when they are in high school.

Probably not, but that's the whole idea. Take away what we want to do and replace it with what we don't want to do. That's what a good coach does. Two games in a row now the opposing coach has taken away what we want to do late and forced us to do something that isn't in our best interest. Maybe they both saw the same thing on tape.?.? If it happens a third time in a row, I think they call it a trend.

If there are enough data points to make measurements statistically relevant, this is true. One game is not enough data points to do that. I'm sure that thousands of data points would reveal that two point shots are more likely to go in that three point shots. I'm also pretty confident that who takes the shot from where on the floor is critical in looking at who should be shooting. For example, a center taking a three point shot would not have as good of odds as going in as a shooting guard. Same goes for a guard trying to post up a center. The odds of individual players making certain shots is more important than what the team average. After all, only one player at a time can shoot and it only matters what he can do at that point, not the team.

Last week, I said it seems as if the program is a little stale. A lot of things could explain this. One major one is videotape. If we are always doing the same thing all the time, teams know what we are going to do because they see it on tape. Gaudio was talking about a website coaches use to watch video instead of trading film. Since they see multiple games from the past, they can better guess at what we are going to do. Since they know what we are going to do, they can put a strategy around defending what we do. After last year it would have been a good time to rotate out some assistants to freshen up the program a little. New ideas are good. What was McFadden doing giggling about something with a low level assistant on the perimeter of a timeout huddle late in the game? Giggle after the game, not during the game. From now on, no giggling in overtime.

WOW!!!! That's an amazing stat. Depressing on some levels as well. Today was such a winnable game.

Winnable game with the group of Zips on the court today. OSU is not a very good team and we were just as talented as they were. Very poor situation awareness late in OT and the Zips basically run the clock out on themselves. I know it's early, but BOTH of these teams did some really stupid things today. OSU has some young players and that is to be expected. Some of our veterans were not very smart today. If the standard is to take the program to another level, that has to change. We need to be smarter later in the game. The telecast was very good. I like listening to Dino Gaudio. He goes beyond the cliches we hear from color guys and explains details of the game to the audience. His critique of Zeke was spot on and I hope if Zeke hears it he takes it to heart. It's all the little things added up that make up an NBA player.

The Zips beat a much better Mississippi State team last year. They should win this OT game.

Article Worth a read if you are considering having your son play youth football. I have to admit. If I had a young son, I wouldn't let him play full contact football until he was at least in seventh grade. The more I learn, the more certain I become it is a danger to the kids full of almost entire risk. My school district did not have football until seventh grade and several of us managed to play college football. Kids below the grade of 7 do not have the muscle memory to apply anything they learned in pee wee league to even junior high school football.

The jinx you brought on the Steelers is worse than the one you bring on the Zips when they play at OU.....

Arriba Los Zips!

Agreed. Besides, there's not cutting in line. There are thousands of Browns fans ahead of ZipsWin!.

Good story. However, it would have been better if the above sentences read....As he/she did so I squeezed off a pretty loud and smelly fart in its general direction. The smell was so bad, the Can't State season ticket holders around me vomited up their bong water. Serves 'em right.

I don't see anything wrong with the Zips early season schedule. Plenty of difficulty in November and December. More difficult than the recent past.

Story? Don't you mean stories? Depending on how far Ashland goes into the playoffs, Pluto could have potentially a months worth of material.

I disagree. The Zips have to make outside shots against pressure all season this year. The one thing CCU did really well Friday was getting back on defense. Any team that thinks they are going to get a lot of offensive rebounds with Zeke in the middle is playing a losing game against the Zips. Zeke went 3-5 shooting Friday. On the surface, that looks like a really good stat. Is it? Is 60% good or is the fact that Zeke only took five shots a problem. Only numbers 12, 4 and 34 took fewer shots out of the nine who played. He made lots of foul shots, but he almost never gets a basket plus one. That's part of the the next level everyone wants to see....Zeke making freakishly good offensive plays around the basket and dunking on the crap that is MAC big men. Lots of people say Zeke needs to get aggressive on the offensive end. He needs to do one thing first though. He needs to get comfortable. I've never seen a four year starting center look as uncomfortable with the ball in his hands as Zeke did Friday. 34 looks more comfortable with the ball in his hands than Zeke, but he has a ways to go in other areas.

I believe we can be successful as a D-1A program. I could also be totally wrong. As a point of fact, thus far, I am almost totally wrong. Give TB three more years to get something going. If failure continues, figure something else out. By then, the changing landscape of college football may be to the point that the BCS schools figure it out for us. The experiment is now 25 years old. Margaret Mead didn't hang out with the apes in Africa for this long and she learned a Hell of a lot. In three years, the experiment should be complete one way or another.