A little noise from the Panther message board:
From Black PantherU
Here's the deal. If Youngstown State wins its final 10 and goes 15-3 in conference, wins the HL Tournament and goes to the NCAAs, I'm still in favor of removing them from the conference.
It's not that YSU can't win. They should have won at least 6 games last year in conference when they won 2. But the university, fundamentally, is a bad fit for the Horizon League.
It is, primarily, a football school. As well they should be. The other two schools, Butler and Valpo, are primarily basketball schools who only have D-I football because the NCAA would no longer let them play D-III. YSU is all about football, which is the way they should be because football is the king of sports.
However, the Horizon League is a conference that is first and foremost about men's basketball. Having one team in the conference with different priorities throws things off whack. This is why YSU is worst or near the bottom in numbers that people don't glean from the box score but make a big difference in an athletic department - attendance, budget, recruiting budget, coaching salaries.
Basically, Slocum has finally found a nucleus that can win together, and kept them together. For the last decade, so many kids have left YSU's program because they hate it there. They lost kids this past year too (among them Devonte Maymon, surprise), but they were "addition by subtraction" as Slocum himself has said.
More tidbits from BBFran from the Panther message board.
The result didn't surprise me. We won by the skin of our teeth there last year. YSU has a good squad.
That said, I was still impressed that we never flinched in the game. Our team has mental toughness, and that will stand us in good stead throughout the remainder of the season.
Now let's see if we can steal one from CSU.
P.S. It's no palace, but it's still frustrating to see that YSU, a football school as Jimmy noted, has a facility like the Beeghly when we have nothing. Especially when there's nobody there to watch a game.
