MBB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[Titan Q]

Coaches poll is out:

1. Augustana 48 (6)
2. Elmhurst 44 (2)
3. Illlinois Wesleyan 35
4. North Central 32
5. North Park 26
6. Wheaton 19
7. Millikin 13
8. Carthage 7

I got close in March!

My way-too-early look at 2015-16...

Clear Favorite (clear preseason national #1)
1. Augustana

Clear #2 (potential preseason top 10)
2. Elmhurst

Top challengers for 3rd
3. Illinois Wesleyan
4. North Park

Top 4 contenders but depends on some stuff
5. North Central
6. Wheaton
7. Millikin

They'll have to prove me wrong
8. Carthage

I believe the strength of the league, top to bottom, will be at an all-time high next season.  All 8 programs are really getting after it right now, and really trying to win.  As you look at my early predictions above I think you will agree that whichever teams end up in spots 6/7/8, the bottom of the league will be really strong.

[John Gleich]

Coaches poll is out:

1. Augustana 48 (6)
2. Elmhurst 44 (2)
3. Illlinois Wesleyan 35
4. North Central 32
5. North Park 26
6. Wheaton 19
7. Millikin 13
8. Carthage 7

I find it interesting that Elmhurst picked up a second 1st place nod since (seemingly) Augie was a nearly consensus #1 team in the nation.

I'm trying to make that math work too... and it doesn't seem to be adding up.

I looked at the link in Greg's post... and teams don't vote for themselves. But the math still doesn't work. In order for Carthage to have 7, then they would have had to be picked 7th seven times (7*1=7). In order for Millikin to have LESS THAN 14, they would have had to get a 7th place vote. But everyone else would have had to pick them 6th if they picked Carthage 7th. Oh. Except for Carthage.

The math works. Still interesting that Emhurst picked up a second 1st place nod.

[iwu70]

I'd pretty much go with the coaches poll, though I might have NPU over NCC.  I always feel that MU should be higher, but they just don't seem to get it together, even with a lot of young talent, esp. those guards. Strange.  Should be a great year in CCIW basketball.

IWU70

[Titan Q]

Ron Rose talking to WJBC about the preseason poll, IWU's practice season to date, and Mike Marietti's injury - http://stationcaster.com/player_skinned.php?s=711&c=3911&f=4982873

[Gotberg]

North park has the roster posted.  I would include a link, but don't know how to do it on my phone.

[Gotberg]

North park has the roster posted.  I would include a link, but don't know how to do it on my phone.

Think I figured it out:  http://athletics.northpark.edu/roster.aspx?path=mbball&tab=basketball

[iwumichigander]

Wow, looks like I'm doing a monologue today.

Wheaton's roster is up. No Luis Miller this year. I wonder if he's sitting out a season to heal up his damaged knee with the hope of coming back in 2016-17, or if he's simply hung it up for good and plans to graduate in May? Either way, I suspect that Wheaton is really going to miss him.

I'm not sure why Luis Miller would be off the roster.  While it would be nice to have him, his impact was to be significantly felt last season and then into this one.  Since he went down with injury pretty early last season, missing him will not have major significance for a team that is looking for big contributions up and down the roster.

While not blind to the obvious obstacles, I am optimistic that this 2015-16 version of the Thunder will make plenty of noise.  Despite narrowly escaping the CCIW cellar last season, Mike Schauer's team was seldom an easy out on any given night(especially at King Arena, Augie notwithstanding) and I expect no less this year.  I'll be looking to see if Michael Berg and Joel Smith finally step up significantly in the vacuum of losing a 3 time All Conference player(1st team worthy) in Brayden Teuscher- this is their chance- no shadow over them.  From what I saw, Murad Dillard is a tremendous talent with a year of defensive seasoning under him and I'm thinking the coaches are looking for him to play a more high profile scoring role.  And having Riley Teuscher back and healthy will give the Thunder another outside threat as losing him last year deprived them of another shooter who could hit a big shot down the stretch- something sorely needed last year.  Ricky Samuelson came on strong late in the season so he should contribute solid minutes as well.

Know very little about the incoming Thunder recruit class as I'm not privy to any team chatter and I don't attend the open gyms.  Would welcome any insights from other Thunder posters.  There should be plenty of opportunity for a freshman or two to see some time so perhaps there's a K-Ray among them(we already know there's a Peters, Tyler's younger bro Luke)?  A few of them have some decent size, 6-5 to 6-7, but from what I saw on recruiting videos I don't think a single one plays back to the basket and that's not great news for us.  More than a little frustrating to research a 6-6 or 6-7 commit and 90% of their highlights are shots from beyond the arc.  Playing the low post is surely becoming a lost art it seems.

What hasn't changed is the typically tough non-con schedule  vs Chicago, @Hope, @Calvin,  @Whitewater although notably missing WashU for the first time in a while(noticed NCC will also be tested early/often).  Would be nice if the Thunder can go 7-2 or 6-3 before traveling to Carver and Shirk to lead off that cool stroll known as the CCIW.  If they struggle early, it could get ugly in rapid snowball fashion.

losing Riley Teuscher really hurt as he provided a lot of energy as well as a dependable shooter IMHO and Wheaton just did not have the depth/experience to compensate

[WUPHF]

North park has the roster posted.  I would include a link, but don't know how to do it on my phone.

Think I figured it out:  http://athletics.northpark.edu/roster.aspx?path=mbball&tab=basketball

I watch a few Wednesday CCIW games online every season.  I am guessing that it is going to be Augustana/IWU/North Central vs. North Park.  No. 5 is definitely the most intriguing player in the league as far as I am concerned.

[iwu70]

Henry is going to be huge this season, I'm sure -- along with another small guard from Augie.  Two guys very hard to stop.  The Millikin guards and EC guards are very very good too!  As pure shooters, I'm pretty happy that Dolan, Rose, Stempel and Pennington are guys on my team, too. 

Marietti likely out 3-4 weeks, doing the rehab on a knee injury.  He's likely back sometime early in the non-conference portion, according to Rose interview and press reports.

IWU70

[Gregory Sager]

North Park is not Ohio State, Mark. We don't stick the definite article in front of the school's name at all, let alone stress it. That whole "The Ohio State University" shtick is the most pretentious thing in college athletics this side of Miami (FL) players and fans referring to their school as "the U".

We Minnesotans also call the University of Minnesota "The U".   But that's more about it being the only division 1 school in the state rather than something to distinguish itself nationally.

Yeah, as an alumnus of a school that's always crawling with Minnesotans, I'm aware of that. But nobody would ever accuse Minnesotans of pretentiousness (aside from a few yuppie precincts in Minneapolis, perhaps). Pretentiousness doesn't fit in well with Minnesota Nice.

Minnesota Nice is overrated.  Check out this article:

Here again, though, I was wrong, or at least only half right, and as an adult I discovered the fun of old-fashioned Midwestern innuendo: the way my aunts, say, could achieve the perfect degree of half-smile when extending their barely dead-toned goodbyes to my sister's boyfriend, which told her how very much they disliked him. In fact, people from outside the Plains think they can mimic us by elongating some O's, but in truth we communicate far more in what we half-say, or fail to say entirely. To live in the Midwest is to experience two realities: the first, all sunshine and bland pleasantries among other potluck-suppering churchgoers; the other, a red-lit underworld where people relay vulgarities through the learned second language of euphemism, eye rolls and loaded silence.

That's the same everywhere you go where people have a reputation for politeness and hospitality, though. Ask a Southerner sometime about what it really means when a Southern woman uses the expression "bless her heart" that is a feminine commonplace south of the Mason-Dixon line.

And, for as much as Minnesotans and Southerners don't see eye-to-eye on a lot of things, they would heartily agree on the common root beneath the "old-fashioned Midwestern innuendo" and the "bless her heart" of the Southern belle.

[Gregory Sager]

I have been visiting Wisconsin 1-2 times a year for the past 10-15 years and I have never once heard someone say Wisconsin Nice.  I wonder why that is.  Culturally, Wisconsin and Minnesota seem so similar.

The term was clearly invented by a Bears fan.

[Gregory Sager]

Last night in the crackerbox NPU took part in the weirdest basketball scrimmage I've ever seen, and the earliest scrimmage as well -- and those two things were connected in some ways.

I don't ever remember a North Park scrimmage taking place in October. Typically, the Vikings hit the floor against an opponent for the first time somewhere around the fifth or sixth of November or so, followed by the second scrimmage less than a week later, usually four or five days before the first game of the regular season. Since NPU didn't start practice until midnight October 19/20, this meant that the Vikings entered the lists against a not-particularly-impressive Lakeland squad with undoubtedly the least amount of prep time that a North Park team's ever had. NPU won the first varsity half and Lakeland won the second varsity half, all of which was pretty immaterial. Ultimately, in spite of the fact that Lakeland has the sort of size against which the Park really needs to scrimmage -- Tom Slyder is going to field another not-very-large team, so the more length that they see right now in scrimmage opponents, the better -- I question the utility of last night's scrimmage. I really think that they haven't put in enough practice time yet for them to be ready to play another team. In fact, the press that he used was something that the team hadn't even practiced yet (fortunately, the players on the floor at the time were returnees who had played it last season). Weird thing is, it really worked ... but that's kinda beside the point.

The reason why it was the weirdest scrimmage I've ever seen, though, had more to do with Lakeland's coaching strategy and overall demeanor. Tom Slyder and his staff clearly worked with a script last night. Fifteen different players saw time in the two varsity halves (two or three of them also got supplemental minutes in the JV half), and nobody played more than 22 or 23 minutes out of the 40. Tom Slyder, Cordell Henry, and Greg Modzelewski should be presidential debate moderators, because they were scrupulous about making sure that everybody got close to an even number of minutes. And some of the player combos that they put out on the floor in an effort to distribute those minutes evenly were downright bizarre. (Joe Biko and Matt McNamara on the floor at the same time? Yeah, like that'll ever happen again.) But you could see the process at work; Tom's clearly trying to figure out early on what he's got, and the best way to see that is in live action against an opponent. Lakeland? Not so much. Muskies head coach Aaron Aanonsen ran his team like it was the NACC championship game. He used ten players, mostly sticking with his top eight, and the Muskies bench was up and cheering as though it was the most important game of the year. It was totally baffling, and I wasn't the only one who thought so. In the handshake line afterward, Tom asked Aanonsen why he coached the scrimmage that way, and Aanonsen responded, "We felt that we had to make a statement after the way that you guys pounded us at our place in last year's scrimmage." Tom's response: "We pounded you?" I'm sure that the result of last year's scrimmage went right out of his head after the NPU team bus crossed back into Illinois, because the season opener against a really good St. Norbert team was fast approaching and that's all that really mattered. But to each his own. If Coach Aanonsen felt that he needed to coach his team that way, then that's his right. I just don't see the point in getting excited about splitting the two varsity halves of a scrimmage when Juwan Henry -- who could (and did) do anything he darn well liked against the Muskies -- scored 21 points and dished out 8 assists in his 22 minutes of action. If Tom really wanted to coach the game as though it counted, North Park would've won by double digits, and I don't say that because I'm a biased partisan. It's simply the truth.

Be that as it may, the Vikings looked extraordinarily rusty, and while no one should ever watch a scrimmage with high expectations, I did a fair amount of cringing last night. Too much aimless dribbling, too much driving into multiple help defenders that led to both charges and standard-issue turnovers, too much miscommunication -- it got really ugly at points. All I could think was, "Well, let's get this over with and just get on to the second scrimmage next week before I make any assessments." And that's mostly what I'll do. But I do have a few thoughts:

1. Charles Atlas beware. You'll never see as many little guys who are seriously cut as you'll see on this Vikings team. These guys put in some productive hours in the Helwig weight room. Although Pete McBride and I were joking last night about "Bart Fabian Syndrome" (which I hope is really just a myth), there's no doubt about the fact that guys like Juwan Henry, Colin Lake, and Jordan Robinson have put on some serious upper-body muscle. The NCAA isn't going to endorse anything that will make players longer, but there's certainly nothing against adding muscle. At least they'll be more prepared to take the physical pounding involved in setting foot on the court during a CCIW game.

2. Juwan Henry ... wow. Did I mention that he had 21 points and eight assists in 22 minutes? He also went a pedestrian 10-15 from the free-throw line, so he should've scored even more than that. The added muscle hasn't slowed him down a bit. If anything, it's just going to make him more fearless.

3. Role player dependability. Everyone knows about Henry, Robinson, and Lake, but I look for long-time role players Michael Hutchinson and T.J. Cobbs to really come into their own this season. Cobbs had a solid campaign last year as the team's defensive stopper and all-around junkyard dog, but his shot has improved to the point where it's now a good thing when he lets fly when he's open on the perimeter. And Hutch, the team's only senior and a great success story, has rounded into both a really strong team leader and as the sort of guy who makes you feel that it's not necessarily a bad thing that your horse in the paint is giving away two to four inches and as much as 30-40 pounds to his matchup. He really gets after it, and he, too, is improved as a shooter. The Vikings are just so much better when he's on the floor, whether as a C or as a PF.

I'll have more to come once there's a clearer picture than the way-too-early snapshot we saw in the crackerbox last night.

[iwu70]

Thanks, Greg.  Henry is going to be such a tough match up for everyone in the CCIW this year. 

IWU70

[Titan Q]

IWU scrimmaged Olivet Nazarene today (NAIA D2 #5).  The Titans won the two variety periods by 11 cumulatively.

Rotation:
G - Rose
G - Dolan
F - Stempel
F - Coyle
C - Seibring

G - Bonnett
G - Nelms
G - Pennington
F - Bausch
F - Mahlke

[AndOne]

IWU scrimmaged Olivet Nazarene today (NAIA D2 #5).  The Titans won the two variety periods by 11 cumulatively.

Rotation:
G - Rose
G - Dolan
F - Stempel
F - Coyle
C - Seibring

G - Bonnett
G - Nelms
G - Pennington
F - Bausch
F - Mahlke

Yes, but we need to know who won the varsity periods too!