MBB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[Titan Q]

Wash U 73
Augustana 70

* Jack Nolan: 28 pts
* Justin Hardy: 20 pts, 7 reb
* Hank Hunter: 14 pts, 7 reb

* Pierson Wofford: 18 pts, 2 reb, 3 assists
* Austin Elledge: 14 pts
* Jacob Pauley: 11 pts

[WUPHF]

Subplots: Bears 10+ on rebounds, matched the Vikings in points in the paint. Hardy and Nolan > Wofford today.

[Titan Q]

Donovan Ferguson was the goat (and not the "greatest of all time" kind) for Augie.

With 1:27 to play and Wash U up 1, he got T'd up for kicking the ball (I think).  Jack Nolan made the 2 technical FTs to push the Wash U lead to 3...then the Bears scored on that same possession to go up 5.

[Titan Q]

Based on my non-conference CCIW watching so far, I like Elmhurst and Carthage as the best two, followed very closely by a 3-way tie involving Illinois Wesleyan, North Central, and Augustana. 

Honestly, I am real close to saying all 5 of these teams are dead even.

[Yogao]

Donovan Ferguson was the goat (and not the "greatest of all time" kind) for Augie.

With 1:27 to play and Wash U up 1, he got T'd up for kicking the ball (I think).  Jack Nolan made the 2 technical FTs to push the Wash U lead to 3...then the Bears scored on that same possession to go up 5.

Didn't see that part of the game, but was it Ferguson or Martin? Early in the game during the broadcast the announcer kept calling Ferguson Martin instead. The ironic part Martin subbed back into the game and theoretically replaced himself.  On the plus side there were multiple mentions of the sport coat, and when it did come off it was a pretty good toss at the assistant.

[Titan Q]

Donovan Ferguson was the goat (and not the "greatest of all time" kind) for Augie.

With 1:27 to play and Wash U up 1, he got T'd up for kicking the ball (I think).  Jack Nolan made the 2 technical FTs to push the Wash U lead to 3...then the Bears scored on that same possession to go up 5.

Didn't see that part of the game, but was it Ferguson or Martin? Early in the game during the broadcast the announcer kept calling Ferguson Martin instead. The ironic part Martin subbed back into the game and theoretically replaced himself.  On the plus side there were multiple mentions of the sport coat, and when it did come off it was a pretty good toss at the assistant.

It was Ferguson.  (Yes, Jay Murray called Ferguson "Martin" a few times - mostly around Ferguson's tip dunk in the 1st half I think.)

[Gregory Sager]

Here's the thing about last night's game in the airplane hangar -- BU won it just as much as NCC lost it. It's not correct to say that NCC's cold shooting was on account of a bad night, while BU's cold shooting was on account of good D by the Cards. That makes it sound like NCC outplayed the Bennies, when in fact the opposite is true. Benedictine earned the win, fair and square.

This won't look like a bad loss at the end of the season after BU wins the NACC.

BU's bad shooting? The Eagles shot 43.8%. The nation's D3Hoops current #1 ranked team is currently shooting 44.4%. Comparatively, it appears BU's shooting was really not that "bad." 

First of all ... apples to apples, Mark. The subject at hand was trey shooting, not field goal attempts in general. Second, Swarthmore had nothing to do with this. The Garnet wasn't one of the two teams in the airplane hangar last week. Benedictine, on the other hand, did shoot below what was then its season average from downtown that night.

Furthermore, when a team basically dares the opponent to go ahead and take the outside shots they then miss, and which BU did for the most part, that's certainly more NCC's having a bad night than tough D by BU.

I did say initially that NCC missed plenty of open shots, which was true both inside and outside the arc. But the other side of the coin, which you didn't mention, was that the Cardinals were shooting .637 as a team from inside the arc coming into that game, and yet they only shot .450 from two-point range against Benedictine. Now, one can argue that the two-point shooting stats for North Central were skewed by the presence of the Greenville game within a small sample size. But the stingy interior D played by UW-Oshkosh against the Cards also entered into those stats, canceling out the layup-a-thon against Greenville to a substantial degree. Anyway, 45% of made two-pointer attempts compared to a 64% average coming into the game was eye-poppingly low. A bit of it was blown layups and missed midrange jumpers. But some of it was Benedictine defense inside the arc, which is more than just "basically dares the opponent to go ahead and take the outside shots they then miss".

North Central would have loved to have shot 43.8%. That would be leaps and bounds above their paltry 28.3%. It could well have been enough to win the game.

I don't believe that it was stated that NCC played good D.

And it was definitely stated that BU earned the win. Read "Don't get me wrong. BU played very well, and got a well deserved win."

That grudging "don't get me wrong" is telling. You conceded almost nothing to Benedictine's performance in your posts, and made it all about NCC's inability to hit wide-open twenty-footers. But it was more than that. As I said, Benedictine just plain outplayed North Central. The Bennies never pulled away, but they established and maintained a lead that they never gave up, and in crunch time they executed and North Central didn't.

I was very impressed by Benedictine's starting five. BU doesn't look like a team with much in the way of depth, but that starting five looks more than capable of beating any CCIW team on a good night.

[GoPerry]

https://d3hoops.com/columns/around-the-nation/2019-20/d3-student-athletes-draw-scrutiny-on-campus

Appreciate this article Ryan, thanks.  You touch on lots of different issues regarding student-athletes that are not unique to DI, DII or DIII.  The appearance of favoring athletes in controversial situations certainly isn't going away anytime soon.  And better integrating athletes into the student body is challenging especially in sports where team bonding is deemed critical to winning. 

[Gregory Sager]

Exactly, GP. (I agree that Ryan's column is a good, thought-provoking one.) Team culture and campus culture are not the same thing, and there's always a danger that even on the D3 level a group of student-athletes can be distanced enough from the rest of the student body, or other significant parts of it, to create conflict. Not to pick on Grey Giovanine, who didn't really say anything out of the ordinary for a coach, but you can see the tension there in his quotes in Ryan's column. On the one hand, he speaks of the Augustana men's basketball coaching policy of only recruiting players who hail from the same areas as the rest of the Augustana student body, implying a conscious decision to create a roster that fits in with all of the other Augustana undergraduates. But at the same time he openly states that a commitment to play basketball for him will prevent an Augustana player from being a "regular student" -- a telling choice of words -- and he further declares that he holds his players to a higher standard than is generally true of the rest of the student body. Those things only heighten the exclusivity of the basketball team and set them even further apart from their peers.

My observation over the years has been that this is a problem that exists on a lot of D3 campuses, and that it happens more often in men's sports and, among men, in the more high-profile sports, especially if those sports are team-performance-oriented rather than individual-performance-oriented. It's hard to create an atmosphere of team bonding and the Us Against Them attitude endemic to team competition without having the Them inadvertently become their fellow students at their own school, especially given the conformism, peer pressure, and questionable decision-making skills of a lot of post-adolescent males.

[WUPHF]

But at the same time he openly states that a commitment to play basketball for him will prevent an Augustana player from being a "regular student" -- a telling choice of words -- and he further declares that he holds his players to a higher standard than is generally true of the rest of the student body. Those things only heighten the exclusivity of the basketball team and set them even further apart from their peers.

I think we have to include the phrase in context:

"I tell our players, 'if you want to be a regular student, you should not be participating in intercollegiate athletics,' and I mean in any of our sports, because you're going to have an additional, significant commitment."

And there may be four or five sentences before and after that explain the commitment part.

It's not clear that the jacket thrower is heightening the exclusivity of his team, intentionally or otherwise.

He might say that part of the commitment is to operate with the understanding that student-athletes will be judged individually and collectively in a manner different than say the chemistry honor society and an individual chemistry major would.

If that chemistry student gets arrested, the Quad City Times headline will read something like "Augustana student arrested..."  If a basketball player is arrested, the headline will read "Augustana basketball player arrested..."

[Titan Q]

Carthage AD news...

https://athletics.carthage.edu/news/2019/12/2/general-director-of-athletics-michelle-manning-accepts-position-at-bucknell-university.aspx

[Gregory Sager]

But at the same time he openly states that a commitment to play basketball for him will prevent an Augustana player from being a "regular student" -- a telling choice of words -- and he further declares that he holds his players to a higher standard than is generally true of the rest of the student body. Those things only heighten the exclusivity of the basketball team and set them even further apart from their peers.

I think we have to include the phrase in context:

"I tell our players, 'if you want to be a regular student, you should not be participating in intercollegiate athletics,' and I mean in any of our sports, because you're going to have an additional, significant commitment."

And there may be four or five sentences before and after that explain the commitment part.

It's not clear that the jacket thrower is heightening the exclusivity of his team, intentionally or otherwise.

He might say that part of the commitment is to operate with the understanding that student-athletes will be judged individually and collectively in a manner different than say the chemistry honor society and an individual chemistry major would.

If that chemistry student gets arrested, the Quad City Times headline will read something like "Augustana student arrested..."  If a basketball player is arrested, the headline will read "Augustana basketball player arrested..."

That's all speculation, though. All we can go by is what's in the quote Ryan offered, which is about narrowing a student's options to participate in student life -- and therefore, in theory, to become more integrated into some other aspect of college -- when he joins the basketball team.

And, yeah, as Ryan also said in his column, there's an additional amount of pressure put on a student-athlete who is wearing the school's name on his or her uniform to represent the school well before the public. But that higher standard sets them apart from their peers even more, if anything.

I'm not saying that the exclusive nature of team membership is all bad. If anything, a certain amount of that sense of having a separate and distinct identity is necessary for a team. I'm just saying that, as I think Ryan's column spelled out, it comes with its own set of dangers, and that Grey's quotes reflect that -- in spite of the fact that his program attempts to conform the roster to the general student population of Augustana in terms of the players' points of origin.

[Ryan Scott (Hoops Fan)]

But at the same time he openly states that a commitment to play basketball for him will prevent an Augustana player from being a "regular student" -- a telling choice of words -- and he further declares that he holds his players to a higher standard than is generally true of the rest of the student body. Those things only heighten the exclusivity of the basketball team and set them even further apart from their peers.

I think we have to include the phrase in context:

"I tell our players, 'if you want to be a regular student, you should not be participating in intercollegiate athletics,' and I mean in any of our sports, because you're going to have an additional, significant commitment."

And there may be four or five sentences before and after that explain the commitment part.

It's not clear that the jacket thrower is heightening the exclusivity of his team, intentionally or otherwise.

He might say that part of the commitment is to operate with the understanding that student-athletes will be judged individually and collectively in a manner different than say the chemistry honor society and an individual chemistry major would.

If that chemistry student gets arrested, the Quad City Times headline will read something like "Augustana student arrested..."  If a basketball player is arrested, the headline will read "Augustana basketball player arrested..."

That's all speculation, though. All we can go by is what's in the quote Ryan offered, which is about narrowing a student's options to participate in student life -- and therefore, in theory, to become more integrated into some other aspect of college -- when he joins the basketball team.

And, yeah, as Ryan also said in his column, there's an additional amount of pressure put on a student-athlete who is wearing the school's name on his or her uniform to represent the school well before the public. But that higher standard sets them apart from their peers even more, if anything.

I'm not saying that the exclusive nature of team membership is all bad. If anything, a certain amount of that sense of having a separate and distinct identity is necessary for a team. I'm just saying that, as I think Ryan's column spelled out, it comes with its own set of dangers, and that Grey's quotes reflect that -- in spite of the fact that his program attempts to conform the roster to the general student population of Augustana in terms of the players' points of origin.

I was up at RPI for the NCAA soccer tourney a few weeks back and saw they had basketball going on in the gym.  I checked it out.  Turns out they have an intercollegiate club program among schools in the area.  RPI was playing Binghamton that day - uniforms, refs, coaches, etc.  I talked to one of the parents: four hours of practice a week, tryouts.  It seemed like pretty high level competition to me.  Guys who just don't want to make the varsity commitment.  Cool to see those opportunities available.

[Mr. Ypsi]

CCIW doing pretty well in the polling - fully half the conference receiving at least some love from the voters.  Elmhurst enters at 17, NCC is 19, Carthage enters at 21, and Augie comes in 24th.  IWU no where near being ranked, but did receive 9 points.

[Titan Q]

Illinois Wesleyan (5-1, 0-0) vs Wheaton (4-2, 0-0), Wed 12/4, 7:00pm...

Illinois Wesleyan (5-1, 0-0)
Injured/Out (Concussion): G - Grant Wolfe, 5-11/185 Jr.  16.8 ppg, 2.6 rpg, 3.6 apg

G - Luke Yoder, 6-0/170 Fr.  5.3 ppg, 1.8 rpg, 0.8 apg
G - Keondre Schumacher, 5-11/175 So.  18.8 ppg, 2.0 rpg, 2.2 apg
G - Pete Lambesis, 6-4/195 So.  14.8 ppg, 3.7 rpg, 2.2 apg
F - Doug Wallen, 6-5/210 Jr.  10.3 ppg, 5.7 rpg, 2.0 apg
F - Charlie Bair, 6-7/220 Jr.  7.2 ppg, 10.7 rpg
---------
G - Cory Noe, 6-2/175 So.  7.2 ppg, 2.0 rpg


Wheaton (4-2, 0-0)
G - Tyson Cruickshank, 5-11/160 So.  17.7 ppg, 5.7 rpg, 3.8 apg
G - Collin Uveges, 6-1/170 Jr.  5.8 ppg, 2.8 rpg, 2.0 apg
G - Nyameye Adom, 6-1/190 Jr.  21.5 ppg, 6.0 rpg, 3.5 apg
F - Cade Alioth, 6-5/205 Jr.  9.8 ppg, 8.3 rpg, 2.2 apg
F - Anajuwon Spencer, 6-8/195 Sr.  12.2 ppg, 5.4 rpg, 2.4 apg
-------
F - Gavin Hawkins, 6-7/215 Jr.   5.5 ppg, 2.5 rpg


Links
IWU Notes - https://s3.amazonaws.com/sidearm.sites/iwusports.com/documents/2019/12/3/Game7_Wheaton.pdf

Pantagraph - https://www.pantagraph.com/sports/college/illinois-wesleyan/luke-yoder-in-starting-lineup-as-illinois-wesleyan-opens-cciw/article_e25ddae9-aeb6-5e62-891b-47617e1af0ab.html

Season preview - http://www.iwuhoops.com/preview2020.pdf

WEXG Radio - http://radio.securenetsystems.net/v5/WWHP

Video - https://portal.stretchinternet.com/iwu/

Live stats - https://www.iwusports.com/sidearmstats/mbball/summary