MBB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[AndOne]

My take on NCC: Guess Jack Burchett had his career game against IWU in the D3 tournament last year. He had 4 points and 7 RBs in 26 minutes at Carthage.

Not sure you want to rag too much on Mr. Burchette based on his performance in one game.

First of all, everyone has their "career game," and so far his was in one of the biggest games of his career in the 3rd round of the national tournament against one of the country's best teams. Pretty good timing I'd say. If you have to pick one game, most people will take that.

Secondly, Burchett currently ranks as follows in CCIW statistics:
* 18th in scoring with an average of 10.4 ppg
* 4th in total rebounds
* 3rd in FG percentage
* 6th in assists--The top non guard in assists in the conference!
* 2nd in offensive rebounds
* 5th in defensive rebounds

Jack is one of the least of NCC's problems so far this season.

Malcom Kelly, welcome back! All he did as a nonstarter was score 42% of Carthage's 65 and hit 5/7 3s. No Carthage starter reached double digits and they still won comfortably

Malcom "Gramps" Kelly did not start last night, but wound up playing 27 minutes. NCC had no answer for him as, in those 27 minutes, he scored 27 points, including 5 threes. Kelly's 27 point total equaled both his number of minutes played, and his "advanced" age. 
No other Carthage player reached double figures.

[AndOne]

Also sorry to hear about the death of Coach G's father.  It hurts to lose a parent, no matter the circumstances.  Praying for peace and blessings to G and his family.

I spoke with Coach G after the conference tourney final last Feb which I believe was shortly after his dad's diagnosis. It sounds like the elder Mr. G fought a courageous battle for close to a year, hopefully without too much suffering.
As Toooldtohoop said, it hurts ( a lot) to lose a parent. Hoping Coach G and his family finds solace in knowing Mr G is at peace now.   

[MalcomKelly25]

Andone what's with the "gramps"?

[AndOne]

Andone what's with the "gramps"?

Just acknowledgment and recognition of your status as an elder statesman among the relative youngsters that you regularly compete against, Malcom. Thats all. 

[iwu70]

My condolences to Coach G and his family.

IWU70

[Mr. Ypsi]

Andone what's with the "gramps"?

"Gramps" has been a nickname of affection for older players who are still stars and good teammates/mentors for at least a century.  You should rightly revel in the name.   (The nickname is especially common in baseball, and would obvious be for players older than 27!  But when most of your teammates/opponents are 18-22, it seems appropriate.  And an honor.)

[Mr. Ypsi]

Regarding post players last night, IWU did have the edge as Ziemnik, Davis and Anderson combined went 14/24 on FGs and scored 37 compared to Schlitter, Hoepfner and Motzel going a combined 8/13 with 21 points. Ziemnik and Davis each attempted 11 shots and, in hindsight, probably should have attempted more. I will be surprised if Ziemnik is not league MOP. I thought Augie's pressure on IWU's perimeter players was one of the keys to their victory.  CCIW Trivia: Only 3 were 3-time MOP winners: Jack Sikma, Michael Harper and Kent Raymond (the award began for the 67/68 season).

If they had started the award 2 years earlier, my suspicion is that Jesse Price would have been a FOUR-time MOP.  He was THAT good, right from the start.

And depending just how early they began the award, the FIRST 4 time MOP may well have been NCC's Bill Warden who was 1st team all-conference in 1952-55. One of just a handful (4?) of players who have been named to the all-conference first team all 4 years. 

Well, if you want to go back to truly ancient times , Bud Schaeffer of Wheaton was 1st team all four seasons from 1947-50.  The difference is - I doubt anyone here has any real assessment of Bill Warden or Bud Schaeffer; while several of us can attest to the incredible skills of Jesse Price.  He was by a considerable margin the greatest CCIW player I ever saw (with recognition that I never saw such players as Jack Sikma, Michael Harper, etc.). 

It was very difficult to maintain interest in the CCIW after graduating (and moving to Michigan) before d3sports.com and video-streaming.  I didn't even know that IWU won the national title in 1997 until the alumni magazine showed up several months later!

[MalcomKelly25]

Thanks.

[iwu70]

Boy, Ypsi, you WERE out of touch way up there in the "sticks" of Michigan.  I had no idea.  At least you got the mag in due time . . .

Isn't D3hoops and streaming video a great thing for being an all-weather, all-location Titan fan?!?!?

Looks like our Titans are going along pretty well, even with the away loss at Augie.  Lots of basketball to be played and I'm still optimistic the Titans will play their best basketball when it is really key.  Not very pretty at NPU the other night.   Am hoping for a trip to Salem later on . . . even coming back from Hong Kong for it!  Hope Springs eternal, (for early Spring in Virginia), heh?

Hope you and all the family are well. 

Go TITANS!

'70

[Mr. Ypsi]

Mark, either the Ann Arbor News or Detroit Free Press probably had the title result buried somewhere in agate, but if so I missed it.  Not much coverage of D3 in SE Michigan (even the MIAA is basically southwestern and central Michigan).

My re-involvement with IWU and the CCIW pretty much began with the 2001 basketball tourney.  What a heart-breaker to Willy Pat and Horace Jenkins!

[iwu70]

Yes, I remember that "Willy Pat" game -- I was there.  And how could anyone forget Horace Jenkins, a speed freak of nature for the D3 level. 

Hope our Titans pull it all together now, now that few injuries are there, and have a strong, big run to the end of the CCIW season.  Could happen.  They sure have the talent and the depth if they can play more consistently and  put it all together.  Sure looked a bit rough around the edges vs. NPU on Satuday.  Big game @The Shirk vs. WC coming up, after the short trip to the Griz and the game away vs. the Big Blue.  Sure do remember alot of great games home and away vs. Jimmy Millikan, back in the day.

Happy New Year to all the D3hoops chatster.

IWU70

[Gregory Sager]

Thanks for the info on the links.  They were not on the IWU site either.

You shouldn't have looked for them there in the first place, Mark. It wasn't a home game for Illinois Wesleyan, and my observation of D3 athletics websites is that many of them don't accommodate viewers for road games by linking to host-school websites. That's especially true when the school in question is supplying its own media, as the Bloomington-Normal radio station that covers the Titans sent a guy to broadcast audio for the men's game.

This is a good opportunity for me to possibly enlighten some CCIW Chat readers besides Mark: Bookmark this page! It contains links to the live stats and video/audio media of all eight CCIW schools for the league's eight sponsored ball sports (football, volleyball, men's soccer, women's soccer, men's basketball, women's basketball, baseball, and softball). It's your one-stop resource for CCIW live stats and webstreaming.

(Don't ask me why, but d3hoops.com does not have video or live stats links to any of today's CCIW games on the front-page scoreboard.)

We rely on others to help with these items and not always are we able to catch the missing ones... especially video and live stat links since we don't know if they will be available or not on a game by game basis (don't want to assume). Sorry it wasn't there... we will keep a better eye out to see if we see these missing in the future.

Yeah -- schools have the ability to add links. We add them when we can, just haven't gotten them all.

All eight CCIW schools webcast each and every home game now. Again, all the pertinent links for live stats and video/audio are listed on that CCIW webcast/live stats links page I linked to above. That page should be all that the d3sports.com mothership needs to monitor sports activity on Planet CCIW.

[AppletonRocks]

This is a good opportunity for me to possibly enlighten some CCIW Chat readers besides Mark: Bookmark this page! It contains links to the live stats and video/audio media of all eight CCIW schools for the league's eight sponsored ball sports (football, volleyball, men's soccer, women's soccer, men's basketball, women's basketball, baseball, and softball). It's your one-stop resource for CCIW live stats and webstreaming.

Never thought about going to the Sager for enlightenment but I will check with my pastor to see if that could help. 

[Gregory Sager]

My take on NCC: Guess Jack Burchett had his career game against IWU in the D3 tournament last year. He had 4 points and 7 RBs in 26 minutes at Carthage.

Not sure you want to rag too much on Mr. Burchette based on his performance in one game.

I agree. Your guess is a dangerous assumption, Lanny. Burchett's not terribly consistent -- his game-by-game numbers this season are a statistical yo-yo -- but he is talented, and he's fully capable of putting together another big night somewhere along the line.

Andone what's with the "gramps"?

Just acknowledgment and recognition of your status as an elder statesman among the relative youngsters that you regularly compete against, Malcom. Thats all. 

Somebody's gotta be the oldest player in the league, Malcom. Last year it was Zach Cassita of NPU. This year, it's you again. BTW, congrats on the CCIW Player of the Week award!

My condolences to Coach G and his family.

IWU70

Mine, too. I hope that it was some comfort to the family that he lived long enough to experience the honor of being the 2014 recipient of the ICBA's highly prestigious Tom "Buzzy" O'Connor Award.

I doubt anyone here has any real assessment of Bill Warden or Bud Schaeffer

I don't have an assessment of Bill Warden as a player, but I do have an assessment of Bill Warden:

1) Phenomenal coach at both the high school and college levels.
2) Bears an ominous physical resemblance to Richard Nixon.

[Gregory Sager]

I'll just be repeating what everybody else has said if I mention that the IWU @ NPU game on Saturday night was ugly and had no flow. But it's worth repeating something that Rob and I discussed on the air, which is that some officiating crews seem to have abandoned the NCAA's points of emphasis for this year regarding what defenders are and aren't allowed to do, and have gone back to calling games the way that they always did -- as I predicted would happen -- but that the crew of Allen Brillhart, John Hodel, and Bill Dowling stuck very much to the NCAA's script on Saturday in the crackerbox, to the tune of 53 personal fouls called on the Vikings and Titans.

Even when the whistles weren't being blown, though, it was not a well-played game. That certainly worked to NPU's advantage, as the Vikings are a whole lot less capable of playing well than are the Titans. A game in which both teams seem to flounder at both ends of the floor is best suited to the team that's used to floundering, so the Vikings were like Brer Rabbit in the briar patch. NPU held a 10-3 lead seven minutes and change into the game, and it had a whole lot less to do with the Vikings playing well than it did with the Titans playing poorly. Then the Titans went on a 22-0 tear over about a six-minute span -- which was a combination of IWU waking up and playing the way it's capable of playing and of NPU just stinking it up -- and in retrospect that was the most important six minutes of the ballgame. Take out those six minutes, and North Park actually outscored Wesleyan over the other 34 by a 57-52 margin. But, alas, basketball doesn't work that way.

As was the case with Wednesday's close loss to Carthage, any assessment of the game is strictly silver-lining territory for NPU. The Vikings didn't play well, but they played tremendously hard. Juwan Henry (19 pts) and Aaron Weaver (18 pts) were extremely aggressive in taking the ball to the hole, which is essentially NPU's bread and butter on offense; the fact that they were able to do so as well as they did was somewhat eye-opening (news alert: IWU has trouble with multiple quick perimeter penetrators), and if Weaver hadn't been restricted to 22 minutes because of foul trouble, the damage that the Park's dynamic duo caused could've even been bigger. JayQuan Lee (11 pts) and Michael Hutchinson (7 rebs) were solid in support. Defensively, NPU's quickness seemed to give the Titans trouble in terms of their ability to set up their offense; I suspect that Dylan Overstreet (1-6 shooting, 6 turnovers) would rather forget that game.

During that 22-0 run, the Titans were either double-teaming Henry or hard-hedging him; I couldn't figure out which, because he never had the ball in his hands long enough for Rob and I to identify which defense Ron Rose was employing on him. Whatever it was, it worked; Henry only took one shot in the game's first ten minutes and was 2-7 from the field in the first half. But Rose went away from defending him that way. I'm not sure why; as I said, it worked.

In spite of the 22-0 first-half run, and in spite of the humongous difference between the two teams in both size and talent, it was a six-point game with 8:04 to go, with 7:37 to go, and again with 7:18 to go. It's not as though anyone was looking around the crackerbox for somebody packing a slingshot and five smooth stones in his pouch, but the silence from all the green-clad folks sitting on the east side of the gym was palpable. But Aaron Weaver fouled out at the 5:37 mark, which felt like a back-breaker for NPU, and Andrew Ziemnik, who had not played all that well up until the end, finished the job by hitting two treys within a 35-second span around the five-minute mark -- the first one was from a good four feet behind the arc, at least -- to push a nine-point Wesleyan lead to 15 and essentially end the game.

I've watched Wesleyan play several times now, once live and the other times online. Against Wash U, the Titans looked like world-beaters. Against NPU, they looked like they had serious feet of clay. I think that they're the best team in the league, and I pretty much still expect them to win it and host the CCIW tourney. But for all the mountains of hype that've been thrown their way by their supporters on this site since school started, and all the hubris inherent in discussing the so-called injustice of IWU and UWSP being forced into the same side of the bracket for a D3 tournament that's still a month and a half away, it's not a team that can simply win just by showing up at the right gym every Wednesday and Saturday. Sorry, Titans fans, but that's the truth.

My guess is that Wesleyan, Augie, and Wheaton will each hold serve against each other in their own gyms, and that the league title and tourney hosting privileges will come down to which team manages not to falter against one of the other five CCIW squads. I thought, and still think, that Wheaton's the most vulnerable of the three -- needing overtime to beat Augie at King does nothing to make me change that assessment -- but I'm less and less sure that IWU will avoid a Loras, Part Two, in which an ordinary team sticks it to the Titans. It might not happen, but it certainly could happen.

For NPU, it's just one game at a time. I've said it a million times already, but it's a young team, and the thing to watch in a young team is if it makes progress from one game to the next. It appears to me that the Vikes are doing just that. But there's a big gap between "making progress" and actually winning a game in this league. I'm not yet sold on the certitude that the Vikings will be able to leap that gap at some point in their remaining eleven games. NPU is not just a young team, it's a small team in a league that is not known for giving teams with no inside presence a break. And, as the 2-15 performance from beyond the arc by the Vikings on Saturday proved (with the two made treys coming from a player, Juwan Henry, whose outside shooting is not his forte), it's also a team whose three-point shooters are currently either invisible (Garett Gatz and Ryan Hyrn) or injured (Reggie McGee). NPU is a long ways away from a CCIW win. Here's hoping that I get to eat those words 48 hours from now when Elmhurst comes to the crackerbox.