GP1

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.

The quality of the Big South isn't near the quality of the MAC. In fact, it is a terrible league. I would be surprised if CCU finished in the top two spots of the MAC East if they were in our division. A close loss to CCU, if they win their conference, will not even enter the minds of the selection committee. It's MAC Championship or bust for the Zips this year.

How short memories are. Some years ago, UCONN came to town in their first year of d1 and beat the zips.

@STZ your contempt is understandable. Over often thought Akron would be a great book in terms of their football failure. Chapters could be, but not limited to the following. 1. Faust knew what to do and nobody else did. 2. The mistake of keeping Dennison as AD. 3. A natatorium does not a d-1 team make 4. Apathy 5. Replacing the rubber bowl 6. Marketing vs winning: they are the same thing. 7. Keeping coaches too long 8. Recruiting: no NE Ohio high school coaches, your leftovers are not d-1 players....get over yourselves. 9. Tob Wistrello: Akron's Katrina. Over the next two years, this book could be written with the two possible titles for the last chapter. 1. Finally 2. Enough is enough.

It could always be worse. You could have been stupid enough to drive three hours, through on cotton field after another, to the game and then made plans to spend the rest of the weekend in Redneck Central. What kind of idiot would do that?

CCU is not a good team. Suspended players should not have mattered. More of the same. Zips pooping their pants n the clutch. Offense with guys standing around. No meaningful improvement YOY in key players(s). Losing easily winnable ooc games. I will say this next one as nicely as possible so I don't hurt anyone's feelings...KD was absolutely terrible last night and should give his salary for this week back....I hope he enjoyed his trip to the beach because he didn't do much else while down here. $500K a year? More waiting for the Mac to start so we can get excited about the mAC Tournament. None of this has to do with suspended players. I hope I'm wrong, but this programs looks stale to me. KD could have shaken his staff up some last year and decided not to. New ideas produce new strategies. The same old ideas produced more of the same. CCU was so much better prepared for us than we were for them it wasn't even funny. I know we are not supposed to talk about Q, but his loss is a huge problem. He just wasn't a player, he was a key player.

First of all, congrats to CCU. With MUCH less talent than what the Zips put on the floor last night, they put clinic on how to beat the Zips. Every team who plays Akron should watch the film of last night. Some rambling thoughts.... The loss of Q will hurt this team. Let's start with the basics....overall athletic talent. Running fast, jumping and hand/eye coordination. AA can run fast with the ball. There isn't anyone who can keep up with AA and the team overall is much slower and thus, less athletic. Jumping...let's see how we are when suspended players return. Hand/eye...It's there, but I think the team, overall, could use some physical conditioning. Loss of hand/eye corrdination sometimes can be a sign of fatigue and the Zips look more tired at times than they should. Depth. This team is not 10 deep and everyone needs to stop pretending it is. They have 10 guys KD plays, but the base talent isn't there to play that many. The Zips have an 8 man rotation and two guys who should play when in a pinch. Other than that, everyone should enjoy a great seat to watch the game. My favorite Zips is AA. I joked about it last night, but he is just a little chubby from his time off. Needs some exteded workouts and watch what he eats until he is 100%. Was not limping. I think he is one of the players whose eye/hand coordination will be greatly improved with conditioning. He was trying to do some things last night, but his body wasn't keeping up with his mind. Zeke is my second favorite Zip. I don't see improvement in his offensive game this year. This will be a problem because the loss of Q's point have to be made up elsewhere. He'll get points at the foul line and dunks, but not much offensive coordination there. Coastal figured that out early. They doubled early and when they realized there was no threat, they played him straight up and did a good job guarding the perimeter. It's on film now...Lesson learned for the MAC. CCU had this center who was what we called in the old days, wirey (sp?). Sort of this skinny guy who plays his butt off because he isn't very talented. He was 50% talent and 25% hustle and 25% crazy and he played a very good game against Zeke. Even though CCU went on a little run right before half, I think it was 6-0, I really felt the Zips had figured something out. Even thought the game was close, it felt as if the Zips had gained some sort of upper hand againt CCU. CCU did all of the littel things to win the game against a team with better players. Hustle and hard work really paid off for them. Nice new arena for CCU and the crowd, especially the students, were very lively. I think a lot of people are overreacting to the loss last night. There is a looooong time between now and March. My biggest concern is I see more of the same. More of the same does gets a trip to the MAC Finals and a 50/50 shot at the NCAA. Later, more of the same results in a first round NIT or NCAA loss. I understand we had two guys out, but they are part of the more of the same and I took that into consideration when i wrote the previous thoughts. I'm going to go walk on the beach. Have a great day everyone.