What Can We Do?

[zipsbandman]

What can the fans do? Somebody is to blame, and I want answers? Is KD too stubborn with the scheduling? Is our AD doing nothing? Is it the MAC office? The athletic department lives and dies under ticket sales. We need to send a message here.

[mcperp]

The whole thing is a slap in the face not only of the University, but of the city. There's no respect for our hard-working, non-glitzy town. The Zips hoops team is a gritty reflection of the city itself, and just shows that the self important morons in the NCAA figure that a snub of the city is just a day's work. They have no worries that our town will fight, and won't lose a moment of sleep over the whole thing.What can we do? It's a fair question, and always a good place to start when a calamity (relative of course to the world's problems) such as this have torn your foundation asunder. We must get bigger money and bigger support from the community in order to earn the respect of the NCAA. The NCAA is a money whore who rules parochially in any, and all David vs Goliath situations. We can start by getting local and corporate support for a 4-team holiday tournament at the JAR. Bring decent high-level teams like Pitt, WVU, Missouri State, Syracuse, etc with guaranteed money. Make it an annual, respected tournament, maybe even with LeBron tie-in. We cannot continue to allow others to control our own fate, wins over big name teams will go a long way in solving that problem.

[bryanschapiro]

Email is a wonderful thing. I personally will send mass emails to radio stations around the country. Newspapers, and TV too. Nobody outside of Akron will remember this great team if we don't do something. Maybe if they listen to what we have to say, they will realize all of the things this team did, and then in the future things might be different. Signed, Insulted (and sad)

[Zipgrad1990]

One problem is the NIT gets no respect at all so on the major websites I couldn't even find a mention of our snub. Maybe if the NIT was still 40 teams they would have had to take us. Of course then we would have been screwed like last year as one of the teams playing the first day and then having to go to a rested opponent a couple of days later to play on that opponets court.

[UADavid]

Why would anyone in cali or texas give a damn about the Zips when the local paper won't give them the time of day. The last couple of nights have had good articles on the team, but the bj has been absent for most of the season. Same with the cleveland tv and radio stations. Listen to wknr and you'd be hard pressed to find any sport talker mentioning the zips during the season. And the gary waters feature on ch. 3 made me sick. Screw him! Asked when they could see cleveland st. in the ncaa's, he said they would see great improvement in year two, then said second or third year. He also implied it was our own fault because the schedule was so weak. We can't play 20 road games a year. Special thanks go out to espn for giving us Austin Peay, so the win could raise our sos and rpi. Well done, that bracket buster was really helpful.Thanks go out to the nit for the final insult and snub. To the members of The University of Akron basketball team, thanks for the record setting year.

[Whippett]

Flood the MAC office with emails and phone calls.....they made a big deal about Laing Kennedy being on the search committee.