Been gone from this Board for years.  Periodically checked back in to see if any of my SCIAC squads can give us some national cred.  Thought this year could have been it.  Scali's squad looked ripe for it.  They finally got away from the Land of the Losses in Spokanistan.  Instead, headed out to play a tough team on a neutral court.  Best player in the conference.  Knocking on the door of the top ten.  Plenty of upperclassmen.  Plenty of motivation (did some guy really equate the SCIAC here to intramurals??  please tell me Scali had that on his whiteboard before the game).  This HAD to be the year. 

Not to be.  No consolation in an OT loss.  One and done.  Back to my hole. 

Quote from: OxyBob on January 05, 2011, 05:08:44 PM

Quote from: stag44 on January 05, 2011, 01:52:47 PM
Kats will have his guys ready to compete and Caltech wont creep up on any SCIAC team this year.

I think it's hilarious that we have someone in here talking smack about Caltech.

OxyBob

That is kind of funny.  But heck, with CMS losing our conference's best player to injury, Cal Tech became the best thing we have to talk about.  Nobody in our conference did squat after that CMS win against Azusa Pacific.  Since I think there are pretty good coaches in the SCIAC from everywhere from Cal Tech to Redlands, I take that poor pre-season performance to mean that nobody had a very successful recruiting year.  Or let me rephrase that for the defenders of current players, no SCIAC school succeeded in bringing in enough immediate impact players to get any quality wins outside of the SCIAC fishbowl in the near term.  For those of us who live outside of the southland, that is unfortunate. 

I for one am pulling in a huge way for Cal Tech to get some more national press this season by starting with one, and then racking up some real SCIAC wins. 

hugenerd, I wish the Beavers could do it Saturday, but it is Kats.  The Beavers will get wins in the SCIAC, but this one against Kats will be difficult.  Kats has scouted that team so many times this year that someone asked him if he moved his family over the summer to Pasadena!

Hey, SCIAC is the lead story!  Loving it.

With the SCIAC nowhere to be found in the Top 50 of DIII this year, we all probably should accept that this is the year of the Beavers at CalTech.  Their coach was part of the turnaround at MIT, lifting that program up from the DIII baskeball ghetto where we all reside and into a consistent national power.  CMS & Pomona, take note: being an academic powerhouse does not confine you to the basketball underworld.

I am not sure CalTech can have that success but who is to say they can't.  Eslinger is a guy with vision. 

CalTech will not only win a SCIAC game this year, but they will win more than 1 game.  It will be a great story. 

My other predictions.  I agree that Redlands and Cal Lu look like favorites, with Oxy close behind.  BUT, I go with a different order because each of those teams has holes and nobody is better at exploiting those holes than Scali & Kats.   Oxy is just too young and that means that they won't bring their best game every night.  They will drop 2 to CMS and split with a bunch of other teams.  Same probably with Redlands and Cal Lu.   

Winner: CMS
PP
Redlands
Oxy
CalLu
Whittier
LV
CT

What a great way to start off my morning.  Thank you Scali and Stags! 

Saw that Redlands has a 1st teamer in the women's division, that is amazing!  Congrats! 

Quote from: stag44 on November 12, 2010, 08:18:21 AM
Moving away from this SCIAC Chapman issue which has been beaten to a pulp...

Congrats to Chris Blees and his mention on on the 4th-team Pre-Season All American list. It's a well deserved mention, and puts an even larger target on his back for this year. I'm sure he's up for the challenge!

The Stags are under a week away from their first game!

Blees is good enough to be higher and is being penalized by being in the best team in a poorly marketed, poorly perceived conference.  But having said that, it is great to get someone on the list so congrats to him.

Quote from: Sabretooth Tiger on November 11, 2010, 06:19:44 PM

Quote from: DIIIghetto on November 11, 2010, 01:39:28 PMWould Claremont or Pomona accept it if their government/politics/econ departments were ranked in the bottom tier of liberal arts colleges?  How about the arts?  So why should our institutions accept less with respect to sports?  

Really?  You don't see a difference in resource prioritization?  Don't see a difference in comparing academic programs to athletic programs?  What does "top ranked" mean to you?

Being the member of a "top ten" NCAA DIII football, basketball, volleyball, soccer, etc program compared to a "bottom tiered" program (whatever that is) makes not a whit of difference in the avenues opened to students in their quest for graduate education or a career path.  (Do you think that a Rowan football player has a better shot earning a Fulbright than a Whitman graduate?)  The key in Div III is (at least in theory) participation, not winning or being "top tier."  The goal is to "play the game" win, lose or draw. 

Academics and athletics are apples and oranges.  My point  was to highlight that other elite liberal arts institutions have found paths to national success on the hardwood.   Many of these schools are in the academic competitive set for our best SCIAC schools.  I am one person who does not donate to my college because I support athletic "participation".   My donations to the YMCA and Boys & Girls Clubs are for that purpose.  To your point about resource prioritization, we can save money and meet a goal of encouraging athletic participation at the Club level.  Let's allow our schools to redirect funds to other areas if our primary athletic goal is participation.   

Good points but as a long-time SCIAC fan let me point out that keeping Chapman out based on its enrollment size admits our institutional athletic priority of preserving our little local athletic club.  Success athletically for every SCIAC school is defined by their performance within the conference and against their historic rivals.  This creates a very low ceiling for our coaches and teams.  Our athletic directors should every year engage in a debate about how much money each school can save by jumping out of the NCAA and moving all sports to club status.  Nobody will seriously accept that but it should force the question: if we care about being in the NCAA we should collectively care about where we rank within it.  In basketball and football we are bottom tier.  Self-imposed reality. 

We have to be prepared to compete against larger schools with different academic standards.  Williams, Amherst and a slew of other elite liberal arts schools have embraced this.  They have consistent success on the national scene.  Would Claremont or Pomona accept it if their government/politics/econ departments were ranked in the bottom tier of liberal arts colleges?  How about the arts?  So why should our institutions accept less with respect to sports? 

Chapman helps, let them in.

Long-time SCIAC fan here who desperately wants to see our conference rise out of the bottom tier.  We are not relevant outside of the southland, certainly not in a conversation about DIII basketball.  I know all the reasons why, I just don't accept the institutional athletic ceiling that we have placed upon ourselves. 

Chapman University probably is not a great fit for the SCIAC as an institution of higher learning, but as sports fans we should all want them.   I make that statement knowing that Chapman has tasted national success in the past.   I am hoping those people who influenced that success can be found again. 

My guess is that the biggest obstacles to SCIAC enrollment are folks at a couple of schools in Claremont.  Maybe even Oxy.  Chapman is a threat to them.  They get to disguise it under the cloak of Chapman not fitting the member profile of a SCIAC institution.  Don't fall for it.  Sure that is the case.  But what does that really mean?  Does it mean that their athletes will be bigger, faster, stronger?  Does it mean that their coaches are held to different standards?  Bigger athletic budgets?  Different approach to recruiting?

Bring them in folks.  Another decade of Claremont, Pomona and occasionally Oxy/Cal Lu earning our bid and getting sent home after a first round shellacking is not they way it has to be.   Chapman will help us.

Bob, Oxy has 3 DI opponents, Azusa, Puget Sound & Wisconsin-Whitewater, pretty good for a SCIAC team.  The UPS and WW games are undoubtedly the most important to the DIII nation, but on the west coast with limited budgets, we have to take what crumbs we get. 

Here is to hoping someone emerges from the SCIAC this year who is capable of more than our usual 1st round whipping at the hands of some team that inevitably gets drubbed by someone else.  Scali has not figured out a way to translate his SCIAC success anywhere outside of the IE.  I admire him for stepping up and heading to St. Louis but am fearful that he will pick up a couple of losses, come back and get find a way to squeeze out another bid, and then get stomped yet again in the NW.  Maybe CMS should be scheduling non-conference trips to the NW so it can start to figure some things out for future February road trips. 

It is no fun to be in the ghetto of DIII.  

Congrats to Chapman for the win.  Scali's post-season schneid continues.  Obviously playing Chapman on the road was an advantage for Chapman.  But I guess the bright side is that if Scali's boys couldn't get it done against the Panthers, they might have been the recipient of a serious spanking in Spokane.  

Good luck to Chapman.  

The rest of us will keep hoping for another SCIAC team that is good enough to push through the DIII basement ceiling and get us to at least the middle floor.  No easy task...

http://www.intriguing.com/mp/_sounds/hg/cutdown.wav

Kinda noticable that the two Hen Ws took a little steam out of the Stag braggadocio on this thread.  One of my Stag friends who doesn't follow the team closely told me that he would have rather PP won the SCIAC but CMS swept the season.  Fear not, Scali & Co. avoided that disaster Saturday night. 

And now they get a chance to get Coach Scali his first ever NCAA Tourney win.  Good luck Stags, represent us well.

Predictions for Friday:

CMS 84 - Oxy 54
CLU 65 - PP 64 OT

CMS will straighten out the ship and walk away with this one.   Beating a team for a 3rd time in a year is not that difficult.  Oxy will roll over. 
As much as I wish Kats could pull it out, I think CLU is on too great of a roll to be denied.