ace

I'm all for kids having fun during basketball. And honestly, bench reactions are hilarious. Like in the NBA when a huge dunk goes down and the whole bench just absolutely loses their minds, but those are all spontaneous. Monmouth was fun but like all fads got kind of old after a while. Their whole scripted routine started to feel pretty forced once the media jumped all over it.

I personally don't feel that Monmouth is at-large worthy, as some of their wins that looked great early in the season have turned out to be not so good (UCLA, Georgetown) and they have some pretty poor losses (Manhattan, Canisius). They remind me of Iona a few ago, who did sneak into the tournament, I believe as an 11 seed. Either way I think that if we win out we're looking at a good chance at a 12 seed, but no lower than 13 especially if 1 seeds keep losing.

I still do

Miami over Ball State does seem like a potential upset, although the Redhawks are really poor on the road. Still, I think that's the most likely upset in the first round. I'd definitely like to see EMU beat Toledo.

I'll add the game against a ranked Nevada to that list

I thought it was a pretty uninspired hire to begin with. At the absolute best he was going to be a .500 guy there.

That sounds right. Went from absolute euphoria to despair in 5 seconds. Part of me wishes i would've "accidentally" gotten in Fisher's way before that shot.

Ugh I'll never forget that one. The JAR was rocking after our huge comeback and he came down and hit that shot directly in front of where we were sitting courtside.

This talk about Jimmy Hall has got me thinking about some of my least favorite Kent players. I'll offer up Chris Singletary, Al Fisher, and Rodriguez Sherman. The rivalry just felt nastier then, roughly 07-12. Maybe it's just me but i feel like it hasn't really had the same "zest" to it since Senderoff took over (though it is by no means tame). That being said I still absolutely love putting the wood to them like we did last night.

Jake and Reggie couldn't throw it in the ocean tonight...but their defense and hustle was outstanding. You could tell that they gave everything they had tonight even though the shots weren't falling. I'm glad the rest of the team helped make their senior night a special one.

We did play cmu at home. They don't bother me that much. I'd like to avoid toledo. They have too much talent to be an 8 seed.

You'd like the ivy league. Tournaments are fun but the regular season should mean more.

Wow...I have a hard time believing that. 16th would be INSANE. I would realistically expect us to be somewhere low 40s-high 30s if we win out. But first things first...let's go smash the Flushes and then take the Q.

Sure didnt get his jumper

I hope we get plenty of OU fans. Always makes for a great atmosphere when you have a lot of away fans.

http://www.bobcatattack.com/messageboard/topic.asp?FromPage=1&ForumPID=1&PID=199647 You guys might enjoy a good chuckle here.... I laugh at their hypocrisy. "False superiority?" OU fans are the most delusional when it comes to this...they all seem to think that they went to some incredible elite school. And apparently we're too "condescending and dismissive" to the rest of the league. Give me a break.

I really don't have any doubt in my mind that Dambrot is the best coach in the league. He likely won't win simply because the Zips were expected to do this well and we know that the award rarely goes to "the best" coach (I cite the year Rob Murphy inexplicably won). My money would've been on Montgomery but with the Huskies slipping lately I'll say Whitford.

Well we sure like to make things interesting. We should have had the MAC locked up by now. But, the good news is that all three games left are at home. If we win out, we win the league. Simple as that.

Unrelated to hoops but I was actually in Oxford over the weekend and MU has done a great job with a lot of recent construction and campus improvement without going into financial trouble....U of A should take some notes.

I wouldn't be too disappointed if we got there and lost in the first round. Just making the tournament is the benchmark we need to hit and anything more than that would be fantastic. But the only way I'll be really disappointed is if we don't win the mac.

Ahh yes i remember that. I can't believe no one on the zips bench saw it.

There was a point last night where Jake and Reggie were basically playing the 4 and 5. Without Pat and with Big Dog and Kwan forced to play as passive as possible on defense there was not much we could do. We defended decently in the second half given the circumstances. Do remember that we outscored them in the second even though we were forced to play like that and taking into account about the 5+ free points they got from late-game fouling. The problem was that we were already in such a hole after our inability to rebound or defend the paint in the first half and our hands were tied the rest of the game. It was that run Kent went on about halfway through the first that completely doomed us. If we hit a few shots and have some defensive stand to stop the bleeding and go into the locker room down 4 or 5, the game would've been drastically different.

So...my turn to rant. Cant fans are a-holes. They actually booed Jake when he when had to go out with a racing heartbeat. I made sure to explain his heart problems rather loudly and heard stuff along the lines of "well how are we supposed to know?" behind me. Bottom line is that booing a guy who is clearly in a ton of pain, clutching his chest, and forcing the game to be stopped is just absolutely classless. A lot of stuff about Kent really makes me mad but this got my blood boiling. The guy behind me must have felt slighted by my evident annoyance and decided that he would clap as loudly as possible directly into my ear non-stop the entire rest of the game, which was just delightful. Plenty of rude jeers as well. Also, I thought it was kind of a lame crowd. They got up towards the end, but i just didn't feel the same buzz that I always feel for these games. Noticeably short from being a packed house, too. I know the Akron student section is often pretty poor, but Kent's was about as unenthusiastic as I've seen a student section at a rivalry game, at least at my end of the court. Band played about the same 5 songs over and over. Akron's band/dance/cheerleaders >>>>>>>> Kent's. As for the actual game, Kent sure picked a great time to hit seemingly every single shot and Akron picked an awful time to hit none of them. Nearly everything that could've gone wrong did go wrong, it seemed. Special shoutout to the refs for taking Kwan and Big Dog out of the game and making it impossible to defend the last ~5 minutes (not that we were doing much of that anyways). I'm just in a very anti-Kent mood. Tonight was a major bummer. On a positive note, I was doing some research and we have sent the Flushes home from Cleveland 4 out of the past 5 years. Can't wait to make it 5 in 6 this year.

We will certainly have more bigs next year....some combination of Agba and Olojakpoke will be redshirt freshmen and then there will be whoever doesn't redshirt from Williams, Hughes, and Davis. So while we will have more bodies, it presents two things. For one, none of those guys are really true center material (maybe Olojakpoke?) but more like PF's or combo forwards. Big Dog will be the only center on the roster, and we'll be more undersized, but I see this as a trade-off as we'll likely be much quicker and mobile. This puts us more in the mold of recent smaller-conference teams who have had success like VCU, Dayton, Wichita who sacrifice a lot of size for mobility. The other thing is that we'll be really, really young on the frontcourt. We'll just have to see which newcomers step up.

Be thankful you can't watch this game