MBB: Great South Athletic Conference

[wilburt]

Great answer Pat.  But my friends from MURVUL will continue to demand more national respect from you.  You have to understand that besides UT women's basketball, MURVUL basketball is the only source of basketball PRIDE for those in the Knoxville area.

[mattgrubb]

Actually William,
Knoxville is also the home of Junior Pro basketball, which is the youth basketball league founded by Adolph Rupp.  Also, the women's basketball Hall of Fame is located in Knoxville, so i will agree with your statement.

Good Answer Pat, soon enough the scots will earn their respect with a final four or something and that will be a lot better than just given respect.

[GSAC Killer]

This message is for Mr.Pat Coleman.. First and foremost your rankings are a joke... How can you not even rank the team who has one back to back championships, thats ridiculous... Secondly its quite obvious you think the better brand of basketball is up north.. Would any of those teams want to play Maryville, or Randolph Macon, or even Mississippi College?? I dont think so...  And lastly what about in 2003-2004 the Scots end up going to the Sweet 16 and lose to a Final Four team in John Carrol by only 2 points on a play that could have gone either way and you ended up ranking the Scots 16th... Are you serious.. Let me remind you you also ranked the Randolph Macon Yellow Jackets or whatever the heck they are ahead of the Scots when the Scots beat them at home in the 2nd round of the playoffs... Everyone in the South already knows you are biased to all the Teams down here.. Its ok because who even CARES about Pat Coleman's ranking, what matters how far you get in the tournament..
Scots 8-0 and the great Randy Lambert has not lost a regular season conference game in 6 years ... he is like 100-1 in his conference thats AMAZING... So Scots nation we know it does not matter what they say or what they think we will continue to win 20 games put up NCAA banners and win conference championships......

[GSAC Killer]

oh Pat by the way you speak about our level of play well tell me how many teams have gone to the NCAA tournamewnt 7 consecutive years winning 20 games and being #1 or #2 in their region... CONSISTENCY!!! Something you nothing about with your silly rankings... Enough with you ... By the way with all I have written here you still do a great job of covering the rest of D3basketball and D3 football... Very grateful for your time to our Division...

[wilburt]

Sorry Pat, now GSAC Killer wants to whine and restart the Civil War again.  Didn't the South lose that the first time around?

RMC lost to Lincoln (a northern school) by 23 points recently. I think the interesting question should be do those Southern teams like Maryville, Mississippi College and RMC want to play teams like Lincoln, Amherst, Williams, Calvin?  Well at least RMC will  , and we saw what happened there.   

So if there is a bias against Southern schools, IMHO it is probably justified by their performance against Northern schools in the NCAA tourney.

And Pat, for what it's worth I CARE !

[mattgrubb]

the problem is logistics, can the scots afford to travel the way the old SCAD teams did, not on the typical D3 budget.  Should they schedule a weekend tournament up north once in a while, probably, but who wants to go north in the winter, not me
The Killer is right, if you are not playing in March, then you are not playing for the title so who cares what you are ranked.  Would the scots be 100-1 in the WIAC or MIAA, who knows would be more difficult than the gsac, certainly, but Lambert does find a way to win, I agree his consistency proves that.
Does Lambert do a good job of recruiting players to a school of 1000 students at 30,000 dollars a year, certainly, is it tough to compete against larger less expensive schools, sure, but who cares, let's jump it up in March, we see the same things every year and maryville is there every year
Pat did a great article on maryville after they beat Hampden Sydney in 2000, misspelled the names of most of the players mentioned or just the wrong names period, but he did cover them
Will we stay on him til he covers maryville more, certainly, because we love the job he does and we obviously love our scots and Lambert
Should the scots be ranked higher right now, who knows, does a young team want that target on their back, b/c being 15 or 16th early in the year is a target.
I see a trip to Maryville for Pat Coleman in the future and when he does come to maryville, I have a great place for him to stay nestled in the mountains, he can spend time being bombarded by crazed maryville fans, about 2200 of them in our 2000 seat gym, it is a cozy place, besides he has to take a vacation sometime and what better place than them green hills of Tennessee
GO SCOTS!

[Ralph Turner]

GSAC killer, you brought up post-season play.  Let's look at the recent playoffs since the establishment of the Pools system in 1999.

Maryville has never been to the Elite 8.
Maryville's only victories over non-South Region teams were over representatives from the SLIAC.  There are very few conferences with a less-stellar playoff record.
Maryville's record against members in other non-South Region conferences in the era of the Pools is 0-4.
Maryville's record against fellow South Region Conference, the ASC, is only 1-3.

You mention the in-conference record.  Last year, Maryville earned home court advantage, won the first round game against Methodist (getting the first round "jitters" out) and then you lost at home to a Mississippi College team that had been stomped in its conference tourney and had a bye before traveling 490 miles by bus to Maryville.  Miss Coll went 19-3 in conference, 21-4 including the ASC post-season tourney. That suggests that Maryville would be a good ASC school but not dominate the conference.  (As for growing the conference, the GSAC turned down bids to join from Thomas More and UDallas.)

I would say that there are not enough good teams in the GSAC to toughen MURVUL for post-season play.  MURVUL is good, but not stellar.  They might be considered the most prominent of the "D3 mid-majors".  Matt Grubb has the most reasonable view of his team.  Altho' I have never met Matt, I glean that he has seen and played in several games in the NCAA tourney.

I hope that the ASC and the GSAC can meet again in the tourney.  Better yet I would love to see a pre-season tourney involving GSAC schools and the ASC.

[Ralph Turner]

I second Matt's thought on getting Pat Coleman to Maryville.  Get a good opponent that can give him an assessment of key individuals and teams in the region!  It is a treasure to us for him to give his valuable time (and time away from his family) to see any D3 team in person.

[mattgrubb]

i think one of the best D3 mid majors is a great way to look at maryville and this or next year could be their year to break out of that mold
Ralph, i have seen and smelled an NCAA tourney game or 5 in my day.
That is true, there best wins have been HSC, Mississippi, and RMC over the past 7 years in my opinion
All south regoin teams, but good wins, a nice victory over John Carroll or Wittenburg would have been nice and if the games were in Maryville they could have been different games, but when it goes up you have to go with what you have got and I would be proud if i wore maryville on my chest

[old_lion]

 (As for growing the conference, the GSAC turned down bids to join from Thomas More and UDallas.)

Ralph,
Question for you ... I had heard rumors re the above, but admittedly, have no first hand knowledge. I would love to see the GSAC grow to at least 6 teams. Any idea why the above two schools were turned down? Are there any other possibilities on the horizon?

[Pat Coleman]

This message is for Mr.Pat Coleman.. First and foremost your rankings are a joke... How can you not even rank the team who has one back to back championships, thats ridiculous...

It's not "one back to back championships" -- it's TWO back to back championships.

Or perhaps you mean to say "won back to back championships" -- but then again, our voters know what UWSP has back (one starter, two of their top eight players, and no returning head coach). Perhaps you should do your homework before you question.

[Pat Coleman]

i think one of the best D3 mid majors is a great way to look at maryville and this or next year could be their year to break out of that mold
Ralph, i have seen and smelled an NCAA tourney game or 5 in my day.
That is true, there best wins have been HSC, Mississippi, and RMC over the past 7 years in my opinion
All south regoin teams, but good wins, a nice victory over John Carroll or Wittenburg would have been nice and if the games were in Maryville they could have been different games, but when it goes up you have to go with what you have got and I would be proud if i wore maryville on my chest

That goes back to the "who wants to travel up north" message from earlier -- if the NCAA is going to force you to do it in March, shouldn't you practice doing it in December and January? The same thing came back to bite Hampden-Sydney in the rear a couple times -- they never played one single game outside of the state of Virginia except the one time the ODAC schedule took them to Guilford, in North Carolina. Then in consecutive years, the NCAA sent them to William Paterson, a game they lost, and to Catholic, a game they lost.

I hope Maryville does bust out of the mold a little bit -- predictability is no fun.

[wilburt]

Preach on Pat, Preach on...

I have been trying to get the fans of MURVUL to understand the importance of having a tougher regular season schedule that prepares them to go deeper into the NCAA tourney.  They seem to be content just to beat up on relatively mediocre Southern D3 teams in order to get into the tourney.  They appear to be scared to have a more challenging schedule, because it would affect their coveted won-loss record, ands affect their chances to get into the tourney.

I am reminded of a kid in high school who took relatively easy classes (no AP level classes) and had a 4.0 GPA but wondered why he scored so low on the SAT (about 850 or so).  Yet a kid from the same high school took tougher classes (a lot of AP level classes) had a 3.2 GPA but scored about 1250 on the SAT.  Who would you rather be?   

[Ralph Turner]

Old lion, my thoughts are for growing D3 in the South.  I posted a long analysis on the ASC board about what the 15 schools (after the loss of Austin College and the completion of provisional staus by UT-Tyler) need to do to split into 2 conferences to double the AQ's.  The first response from one school was they did not have the room to add mens' and women's tennis.

I would advise any conference to get to AQ status, as the Pres AC did with Thomas More, the North Atlantic, the NEAC and the Great Northeast have done,  the UMAC is doing and the USAC in football for that matter.

The process to move from NAIA to D3 is about 5-6 years from when the Board of Trustees at old Alma Mater U say they are going to do that.  I have seen the list of exploratory schools and no one in the Deep South is on the list, nor is any school except Spelman on the list of provisionals between now and 2010.  (Spelman should be full D3 in August 2006.)

The fastest case scenario for getting an AQ in basketball for the men would be to add Rust and UDallas.  Or you could steal Oglethorpe and one other.  Another choice might be to find some NAIA schools (e.g., football-playing Shorter) or NCCAA 's ( e.g., Atlanta Christian College) and wait the 5-7 years for them to become full members. I would hate that an 17-9/8-2 Huntingdon won the conference and the post-season tourney and yet did not get a Pool B bid and a 24-3/8-2 Maryville (all 3 losses to Huntingdon) did.

On the New Conference board on the Men's Multi-Region sorry, the General Basketball page, I speculated about a "Little SEC" comprised of the schools that Pat mentioned in his "Interstate 8" blog.

To get the minimum 7 schools for the AQ, the "Little SEC" might include Mississippi College, LaCollege from the ASC, Oglethorpe from the SCAC, Maryville, Huntingdon, LaGrange and Piedmont.  (He is not hearing Fisk in that group. )  Piedmont and Oglethorpe would need to add football for it to be advantageous for Miss Coll and La Coll to move.  To satisfy the requirements for an AQ,  the new conference would need 7 schools fielding the same 5 men's and 5 women's sports, one sport in each of the 3 seasons, and 2 team sports for M&W.

I hope that helps.

[Ralph Turner]

Ralph, i have seen and smelled an NCAA tourney game or 5 in my day.