MBB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[iwu70]

I'm pretty sure the IWU faithful and the powers-that-be at IWU will stick with Coach Rose, through thick and thin.  Yes, a tough year, hit by injuries, and the team not really coming together as we all wished, hoped, but don't see any evidence that the program is in disarray.  Lots of talent there, lots of guys waiting for their chance to make a mark for the program, for IWU.  In fact, I think in the next few years, things will be just fine. 

IWU'70

[GoPerry]

North Park travels to Wheaton tonight.  Might there be a let-down from the Vikes after their devastating OT loss to Augie on Saturday?

Not likely. The Park suffered a nearly identical overtime loss at Elmhurst a couple of weeks ago, and in their next game the Vikings thumped Illinois Wesleyan like a melon.

They fully realize that every night is a different test, and that you have to toss the previous game down the memory hole. That's especially true when you're playing meaningful games, which of course NPU is.

Having said that, an upset tonight at King is certainly not an inconceivable outcome. I said at the beginning of the season that NPU needs to bring it and bring it hard every game or else it will lose, and that has not changed. A team that is as small and as dependent upon a quickness advantage as the Vikings cannot afford to be outhustled. If they have any sort of a letdown in energy, and if Wheaton does what Carthage did in the second half of last Wednesday night's game at the crackerbox in terms of maxing out its own effort, then the Vikes could be in trouble.

I'm not putting this one in the bank yet, and I'm 100% sure that Tom Slyder and his assistants aren't, either.

Park 74, Wheaton 61

North Park actually did not come out especially sharp, but it didn't matter because Wheaton's intensity and preparedness in the first 3-4 mins was lower than a snake's belly.  The first 6 possessions were TO, TO, TO, missed 3 ptr, TO, TO.  Still, the Thunder were able to fight back to only be down 5 at half, but that was about it.

It didn't help that Murad Dillard was in street clothes due to an injury.  Also Jonathan Berntsen picked up 2 touch fouls in the first 1:30 and sat out the remainder of the 1st half.

I would've liked to have seen one of the taller players(6'3" Teuscher, Peters, Winowiecki) guarding Juwan Henry instead of 6'0" Berntsen or 5'11" Morrison.  He can't be guarded without help, but at least you have some length/reach to make him shoot over.  That might've fallen to Dillard if he'd played.

[Titan Q]

Millikin 61
IWU 59

The Big Blue played well and IWU did not.

Milliken beats IWU at home.  Who would have ever thunk it? 

Hate to say I told you so, but I told you so.  Ron Rose's team is lost.  His recruiting the past three classes has been abysmal.  And his management of the talent he did recruit has been even worse.  The results this year speak for themselves.  I did not wish it upon the program, but I did predict it.  He is losing players.  The remaining ones are unmotivated and underperforming.  Ok IWU Board people, blast me for posting an observation that is being supported by facts.  But I've seen it coming for two years.  The program is in disarray, and the coaching staff is the reason.

Ron Rose's teams had a nice 6-year run:

2009-10: 23-8/10-4 (T2)/NCAA Elite 8
2010-11: 20-9/9-5 (3)/NCAA 1st round
2011-12: 23-8/10-4 (3)/NCAA Final Four
2012-13: 23-6/13-1 (1)/NCAA Sweet 16
2013-14: 27-5/12-2 (1)/NCAA Final Four
2014-15: 20-9/10-4 (2)/NCAA 2nd round

Rose is 1 of 3 coaches in Division III to make the tournament each of these seasons.

Despite your completely unbiased, hard-hitting analysis I personally hope they don't fire him.  At every level, great programs have bad years every now and then.

[newCCIWfan]

Matt Nadelhoffer for president!

I've not posted enough to give Karma points ... but this post made me laugh --- a lot!    Keep those Vikings playing well Greg!

[badgerwarhawk]

Ok, it's happened.  I've become a closet North Park Viking fan.  Hope it doesn't jinx them.

[79jaybird]

Pretty solid resume for Ron Rose.  So Carthage should look at canning Bosko  because his team is struggling this year too right?  The logic (or lack there of) with some posters    Ron Rose is a good coach.   IWU is just having a tough year.    Speaking of coaches,  I know Grey will most likely get the COY award if Augie finishes in first (which most likely will happen now that NC couldn't help us out     ),  but I would give John Baines some consideration for COY too.  He has put Elmhurst back on the map. 

Elmhurst looked "ok" last night, though IMO seemed to play down to the level of Carthage.  This effort IMO, won't get in done  vs. NPU or NC coming up.   

[Naperick]

Augie 76
NCC   68

NCC:

* Jagger Anderson: 19 points, 4 rebounds, 1 steal.
Like most players, especially those at the D3 level, Jagger has his deficiencies. However, there is possibly one player in the conference, and I doubt many within the Division, who can drive through most of the opposition and finish as spectacularly as Mr. Anderson. This has been happening regularly lately. Yes, I am a bit biased. So, ask an Augie fan who was at the game tonight.

* Kevin Honn: 17 points on 7 of 10 shooting, and a game high 9 rebounds.

* Jayme Moten: 11 points

* Erwin Henry: 10 points

AUGIE:

* Hunter Hill: 25 points (9/13, 5/8)

* Ben Ryan: 21 points (9/15)

You need not have even passed Basketball 101 to understand NCC had little ability to either defend Hill on the perimeter or Ryan on the interior. Whenever it looked like the Cardinals might mount a run of any kind Mr. Outside or Mr. Inside would seemingly score at will. Hill needed but a split second to launch one of his long range missiles, and Ryan muscled inside or hit the 6-7 foot baseline jumper with little resistance. No other western Viking scored in double figures.

I still can't believe some of the shots that Jagger Anderson made last night.  Hunter Hill made some three's at very crucial points of the 2nd half last night.  As AndOne said, Augustana always had an answer after a run by the Cardinals. 

Augustana went 5-1 against NCC, ELM, and NPU.  They deserve the regular season title.

[AndOne]

Pretty solid resume for Ron Rose.  So Carthage should look at canning Bosko  because his team is struggling this year too right?  The logic (or lack there of) with some posters    Ron Rose is a good coach.   IWU is just having a tough year.    Speaking of coaches,  I know Grey will most likely get the COY award if Augie finishes in first (which most likely will happen now that NC couldn't help us out     ),  but I would give John Baines some consideration for COY too.  He has put Elmhurst back on the map. 

Elmhurst looked "ok" last night, though IMO seemed to play down to the level of Carthage.  This effort IMO, won't get in done  vs. NPU or NC coming up.

Coach Baines might get some consideration but thats about all he'll get if EC doesn't win the conference title. That, of course, is due to the asinine CCIW practice that the coach of the conference winning team, or teams in case of a tie, is automatically named COY. The guy that guides the team picked to finish fifth to a second place finish gets as much consideration as a cup of pee, while the guy picked to win, and who does so with an entire team of returning senior starters, is automatically handed the award. I'm not saying that the winning coach can't do the best coaching job, but automatically anointing him assumes that is the case even though it actually might not be. In many cases it's just plain stupid to make that assumption. I'm pretty sure the CCIW FOOTBALL COY is decided by a vote of the head coaches. Why isn't the basketball COY award done the same way? Evidently, the conference office is not familiar with the word "consistency."

And while I'm on a rant against the CCIW office--Where is the sense in scheduling any of the conference basketball teams to have to play their final three games in a row on the road? With teams fighting for the conference championship or to make the conference tournament at the end of the season, why would you want to handicap any team in that manner? There is absolutely no reason why the schedule has to be set up like that. Again, it's just plain stupid. Next year I hope the guy who makes up the schedule takes his head out of you know where before he starts working on it. 

[CCIW >]

Jagger Anderson = All-Conference (3rd team is most likely)

If you have seen the last handful of games, you know why I say this, and why i said it a few weeks ago...
He is a talent you don't really see often in D3, and that makes him really stand out to me.

PS: anyone know why NCC decided to not guard Ben Ryan last night? Raridon allowed him very standard and easy left handed layups/hook shots/whatever you would like to call it... It was almost as if it was an open gym scenario, Raridon standing straight up and down, not providing any resistance on a Ryan power dribble towards the basket and then when Ryan went up, Raridon would not even consider attempting a block, would just go straight up and down and allow Ryan to finish fairly easily. If Augie would have given Ryan 30+ shots he could have went 25 of 30 from the field and NCC woulda gotta smacked again.

My only thought is that Coach Raridon preached all week that foul trouble would be too hard to overcome and that they shouldn't risk stacking up fouls? If you have to give up a layup, you have to give up a layup.

[Gregory Sager]

This is beyond idiotic. Go away.

Final Four both 2012 and 2014 - yeah this coaching staff is beyond horrible - they should be taken out and shot.

iiwwuu, I'll go beyond USee's reference to your post, you are beyond idiotic.  Go away.

CCIW Chat is quite open-minded, and tolerates a lot, but we DO have limits on stupidity and trolling.

Ron Rose? Yeah, he's only 14-5 in D3 Tournament games with 2 Final 4s in 9 seasons prior to this season. Obviously can't coach and can't recruit. Crawl back into your hole.

This is just plain wrong, people. This is an open forum. Nobody elected any of us sheriff and gave us the power to run posters out of here. And the personal insult was over the line and doesn't speak well of the poster who made it.

I think that iiwwuu is wrong about Ron Rose, and Bob did a nice job of outlining why I think that iiwwuu's wrong. (I also think that certain IWU posters are classic head-in-the-sand types when it comes to their team's misfortunes, but that's another story.) But this was far from the most stupid post that I've ever read here. In fact, it's not even the most stupid post I've read on CCIW Chat this season. A sense of proportion seems to be lacking in the knee-jerk responses to iiwwuu's diatribe.

He's not a troll, either, Chuck. He's a dissenter. There's a difference between the two types of posters. Appleton Rocks? Now, he's a troll. He just comes in here and drops his one-line gibes on us, gibes that have absolutely nothing to do with CCIW men's basketball, for no other reason than to get a rise out of people. We have learned to handle him in the way that trolls are supposed to be handled: we ignore him rather than telling him to get lost. But iiwwuu? He's a dissenter. He doesn't go along with the IWU party line, and that apparently drives some of the Greenie faithful to apoplexy. But he's posting about CCIW men's basketball, and he's doing it at length and with specifics. And that is not troll behavior.

Izzy's right. I don't agree with iiwwuu, but let him say what he wants. He has every right to express his opinion here, whether it's well-reasoned or not.

What I don't like about iiwwuu's posting history is that he went into hibernation while the Titans were doing well, and only came out to excoriate Rose's performance as a coach in the wake of a shocking home loss to the cellar-dwelling team, a loss that has severely damaged IWU's postseason hopes. That smacks of opportunism on iiwwuu's part, as well as a lack of courage to face the music when the coach whose performance he had publicly bashed happened to have his team on a roll. Idiotic? No. But it's hard to take a poster seriously who only surfaces when events are going his way.

[mwunder]

So Carthage should look at canning Bosko  because his team is struggling this year too right? 

Just this season???  20 seasons at a school is a long time...and a certain assistant is waiting in the wings.  Maybe the youngster can recruit a couple of big men to play for the Red Men.

Speaking of coaches,  I know Grey will most likely get the COY award if Augie finishes in first (which most likely will happen now that NC couldn't help us out     ),  but I would give John Baines some consideration for COY too.  He has put Elmhurst back on the map. 

Elmhurst looked "ok" last night, though IMO seemed to play down to the level of Carthage.  This effort IMO, won't get in done  vs. NPU or NC coming up.

10 seniors who can all play will do that to a program too.

[mwunder]

And while I'm on a rant against the CCIW office--Where is the sense in scheduling any of the conference basketball teams to have to play their final three games in a row on the road? With teams fighting for the conference championship or to make the conference tournament at the end of the season, why would you want to handicap any team in that manner? There is absolutely no reason why the schedule has to be set up like that. Again, it's just plain stupid. Next year I hope the guy who makes up the schedule takes his head out of you know where before he starts working on it. 

Maybe it's because Carthage is the northern-most team geographically, but going back to the beginning of the Bosko era, I don't see three consecutive road games to end the season in the CCIW.  I haven't gone back and looked at the rest of the league, but it does seem to be a bit irregular.

[Gregory Sager]

North Park travels to Wheaton tonight.  Might there be a let-down from the Vikes after their devastating OT loss to Augie on Saturday?

Not likely. The Park suffered a nearly identical overtime loss at Elmhurst a couple of weeks ago, and in their next game the Vikings thumped Illinois Wesleyan like a melon.

They fully realize that every night is a different test, and that you have to toss the previous game down the memory hole. That's especially true when you're playing meaningful games, which of course NPU is.

Having said that, an upset tonight at King is certainly not an inconceivable outcome. I said at the beginning of the season that NPU needs to bring it and bring it hard every game or else it will lose, and that has not changed. A team that is as small and as dependent upon a quickness advantage as the Vikings cannot afford to be outhustled. If they have any sort of a letdown in energy, and if Wheaton does what Carthage did in the second half of last Wednesday night's game at the crackerbox in terms of maxing out its own effort, then the Vikes could be in trouble.

I'm not putting this one in the bank yet, and I'm 100% sure that Tom Slyder and his assistants aren't, either.

Park 74, Wheaton 61

North Park actually did not come out especially sharp, but it didn't matter because Wheaton's intensity and preparedness in the first 3-4 mins was lower than a snake's belly.  The first 6 possessions were TO, TO, TO, missed 3 ptr, TO, TO.  Still, the Thunder were able to fight back to only be down 5 at half, but that was about it.

It didn't help that Murad Dillard was in street clothes due to an injury.  Also Jonathan Berntsen picked up 2 touch fouls in the first 1:30 and sat out the remainder of the 1st half.

I would've liked to have seen one of the taller players(6'3" Teuscher, Peters, Winowiecki) guarding Juwan Henry instead of 6'0" Berntsen or 5'11" Morrison.  He can't be guarded without help, but at least you have some length/reach to make him shoot over.  That might've fallen to Dillard if he'd played.

While I agree with your point about Dillard -- aside from Berg, he was the Wheaton player who worried me the most going into the WC @ NPU game back on January 13 -- it's worth noting that he only ended up playing ten minutes in that game. He started the second half, came out after less than three minutes, and was never reinserted into the game at all. He only played ten minutes in the following game as well against Elmhurst. He's gotten starter's minutes since then, but it appears that Mike Schauer's had him on a bit of a yo-yo this season.

Like most players, especially those at the D3 level, Jagger has his deficiencies. However, there is possibly one player in the conference, and I doubt many within the Division, who can drive through most of the opposition and finish as spectacularly as Mr. Anderson.

The one CCIW player who can "possibly" do that has a nice picture from last night that's attached to the NPU @ WC gamer on the NPU men's basketball page. It shows him splitting three Wheaton defenders and releasing a shot while flying through the air at a 45-degree angle. Yeah, I'd say that he can "possibly" drive through most of the opposition and finish as spectacularly as Mr. Anderson.

[mwunder]

The one CCIW player who can "possibly" do that has a nice picture from last night that's attached to the NPU @ WC gamer on the NPU men's basketball page. It shows him splitting three Wheaton defenders and releasing a shot while flying through the air at a 45-degree angle. Yeah, I'd say that he can "possibly" drive through most of the opposition and finish as spectacularly as Mr. Anderson.

I didn't get a protractor out, but I'd say that is much closer to 55* than 45*.

[Augie6]

And while I'm on a rant against the CCIW office--Where is the sense in scheduling any of the conference basketball teams to have to play their final three games in a row on the road? With teams fighting for the conference championship or to make the conference tournament at the end of the season, why would you want to handicap any team in that manner? There is absolutely no reason why the schedule has to be set up like that. Again, it's just plain stupid. Next year I hope the guy who makes up the schedule takes his head out of you know where before he starts working on it. 

Maybe it's because Carthage is the northern-most team geographically, but going back to the beginning of the Bosko era, I don't see three consecutive road games to end the season in the CCIW.  I haven't gone back and looked at the rest of the league, but it does seem to be a bit irregular.

Although I agree with AO's sentiment, this type of scheduling has happened in the past.  In the 2013-14 season, Augie finished with 4 of 5 games on the road to end the CCIW regular season.