Friday's Game vs UWM

[IAA Fan]

Slocum vs. Jeter was a good coaching match-up. Both teams waiting for the last possession. We made the free-throws & forced UWM to shoot threes; which they could not do all night & Slocum knew this. Too bad that last basket did not count ...the fast-break slam looked great. Big things I saw:

1. Some quality bench play.
2. We still miss too many shots, but free-throw shooting was clutch for the guins. We must have been too tired, as we lacked intensity in the second-half. Otherwise good-guys win by 20+.
3. Poor attendance.
4. Eargle is a very confident player ...and growing more so.
5. The fouls were so evenly-spread. We had 4-guys with 4-fouls on the floor at the end. Didn't someone foul-out, or was that a miss-call by the announcer?

[ELPENGUIN]

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.

[YSUGO]

I think alot of those posts are dead-on!

[IAA Fan]

Those guys are bunch of idiots. What team does not like having a couple of guaranteed wins in their pocket each season. Then when we have a decent season ...they cry like children. What do they want? They want us to improve, well here it is. They are primarily a men's basketball conference? ...the Horizon is ONLY a men's basketball conference. There is not another sport in the conference that would receive any other type of "at-large" bid to any NCAA post-season action. Everyone of those people should know that we were brought in because our Lady Pens were coming off of 3-out-of-4 years to the NCAA ...they wanted to pump up women's sports and we had them. Let's see the figures:

MAC: better golf, better hockey, better up-half men's basketball, better baseball, better soccer.
MVC: Better everything.
OVC: Better womens sports, better baseball, better Olympic sports.

The best thing that could happen to this conference is if they can some how lure Dayton & Xavier back. Then let the HL become a primarily Ohio-based league. Or, as we have covered over and over ...join the MAC. That one post is written by a YSU person ...clearly. Yes football where it is at here, none of us would have it any other way. With two exceptions (Butler and Valpo), every school in the HL has a power sport other than men's basketball. UWM lucked into Pearl, or they might as well not have any men's sports ...and really do not. Green Bay is Skiing, UIC is Volleyball and Gymnastics, Loyola and Detroit are following the fate of all Parochial schools ... looking for sports to cut, YSU is football.

We joined the conference for one reason ..multiple teams in the post-season ...and more monies from it. Well that has not really been the case in recent years. The cash grew recently because of how far Butler advanced. It is only a matter of time before that dries up. In fact it is just because Butler does not have a a legally-scholarship based football team that not already out of the HL.