MBB: Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association

[HOPEful]

Calvin = (20-4) .833 ; 1-3 v RROs ; SOS .503
Wabash = (18-7) .720 ; 2-1 v RROs ; SOS .545

I would personally be inclined to count Wabash's bad losses harder against them. But Calvin's SOS is really killing them as is their record against RROs. I've said time and time again how stupid RROs are and that they're just a double dipping of SOS. In Calvin's case, it's even worse, because it makes their SOS look really, really bad if you take out their losses.

I believe Calvin is a better team than Wabash. But by the fairly transparent criteria, I can't argue with them being ranked below Wabash currently.

[HOPEful]

Although I believe it's not indicative of who's actually the better team, functionally, Calvin not being a RRO doesn't change much. If they're the #7 team in the region, they still have a close to 0% chance of coming off the board should they not win the MIAA tournament. Too me, the bigger functional impact is to the teams hoping to host in the playoffs. For the teams at the top, an additional win in the RRO column could be the tiebreaker. I'm sure Wheaton and Elmhurst would both love for those wins against Calvin to count as RROs.

[KnightSlappy]

MIAA has announced the quarterfinals are postponed to Thursday

[Flying Dutch Fan]

MIAA has announced the quarterfinals are postponed to Thursday

For the safety of all involved I think that is a very good decision

[HOPEful]

MIAA has announced the quarterfinals are postponed to Thursday

For the safety of all involved I think that is a very good decision

Agreed. Although almcguirejr's suggestion of having these games on Tuesday wasn't horrible. Giving a buffer day to try and assure that we don't have three straight days of games seems like a decent idea.

[HopeConvert]

Sam Lewis, a 6-6 forward at Milford High School, announced his commitment to attend Calvin University on his Twitter account today.
https://twitter.com/samlew32/followers_you_follow

Calvin is offering its education on twitter now?

[calvin_grad]

MIAA has announced the quarterfinals are postponed to Thursday

Can they do Thursday - Saturday - Monday, or is that not an option? Does the tournament need to end by Saturday for selections?

[Gregory Sager]

Sam Lewis, Milford HS, committed to Calvin University

Seems like a good get... I saw [Lewis] had offers from DIII...

What does offer mean these days, in this context?

"Offer" now has two meanings from a D3 perspective. The way that ziggy used it is the traditional meaning: Coach scouts prospect, coach contacts prospect, coach establishes relationship with prospect, and coach tells the prospect, in one way or another, "I'd like to have you on my team next year," with that last stage being the offer itself.

The newer meaning essentially refers to a legally meaningless piece of paper. It's about providing a ritual alongside the age-old practice described above in order to: a) conform to the social-media age; and b) establish a parallel narrative to the scholarship levels in an effort to, if I may be brutally candid here, compete better against them by playing to the egos of 17-year-olds.

So the word "offer" can still mean, "I'd like to have you on my team next year." Or it can be a reference to the document created in a subsequent "accepting an offer" ritual, the signing of a non-binding piece of paper in your high school lobby while your beaming parents look on, with you and your entire family all wearing the apparel of your future school. It's obviously meant to ape the sigining of a letter of intent to accept a basketball scholarship at a D1, D2, or NAIA school. It's a way of telling the kid, "You deserve the same sort of social-media fuss and fanfare that a scholie kid gets, even though we're not allowed to give you any money to play ball for us." But the actual nuts and bolts of how a high-school prospect becomes a D3 recruit remains exactly the same ... and, just as before, the kid is under no obligation whatsoever to even attend the school (he or she can always change their mind) or to participate in that sport once the kid arrives on campus (he or she can always change their mind about that as well), even after signing that piece of paper.

[sac]

That's a fair synopsis from Sac. I think in most years the MIAA has a team of an actual quality worthy of at-large selection but their NCAA criteria rarely live up to it and it almost always comes down to SOS.

In general I would say Hope and Calvin do fine with their scheduling. Both go out and play a lot of good teams, though maybe they could be more strategic about trying to hunt games against teams likely to be regionally ranked and avoid games against teams that are good but might get roughed up in conference (I would shy away from scheduling WIAC, for instance).

Trine's program is at a point where they need to schedule up. The 0.483 SOS they have right now is nowhere close to being where they will get any kind of consideration.

The rest of the league is more at a point where they should be hunting wins of any kind in their non-conference schedule. Too many at the bottom of the MIAA are taking on a much more difficult schedule than they are ready for. Adrian and Kalamazoo don't need to be playing Case Western Reserve, for instance. Too many cases of the bottom of the MIAA playing games they can't be expected to be competitive in. Games against Finlandia, the SLIAC, and the weaker Ohio and in-region Pennsylvania teams would be ideal.

It is a huge problem for potential Pool C contenders in the MIAA when the bottom of the league is bringing so few non-conference wins into league play. It's an absolute tank on the SOS of the conference teams above them.

The MIAA is for the most part the hunted, not the hunter.



Trine didn't really do anything wrong in their scheduling, they played good programs for the most part.  Its a good schedule but some of those teams didn't have great seasons.  What they probably needed was to play a Wheaton, CWRU, John Carroll or Mt. Union.  But again, that requires prescience. 

[Gregory Sager]

If the conference were to work together to increase overall Pool C bids -- and I'm not sure the bottom of the conference has incentive to do this -- the bottom of the league would be hunting wins and the top of the conference would be hunting regionally ranked wins.

The bolded part is the perfect summation of how a D3 league improves itself with regard to Pool C bids.

[sac]

MIAA has announced the quarterfinals are postponed to Thursday

Can they do Thursday - Saturday - Monday, or is that not an option? Does the tournament need to end by Saturday for selections?

Tournament selections are done Sunday night.  Sunday afternoon is an option for all but two MIAA schools.

This is where the MIAA should use Tuesday instead of Wed because you already have a potentially shortened calendar with Hope/Calvin and ya know its still February.

[calvin_grad]

MIAA has announced the quarterfinals are postponed to Thursday

Can they do Thursday - Saturday - Monday, or is that not an option? Does the tournament need to end by Saturday for selections?

Tournament selections are done Sunday night.  Sunday afternoon is an option for all but two MIAA schools.

This is where the MIAA should use Tuesday instead of Wed because you already have a potentially shortened calendar with Hope/Calvin and ya know its still February.

Makes sense.   Even though we know they aren't getting a Pool C bid this year, I guess they can't really leave one spot in the bracket for "MIAA champion".

[Gregory Sager]

Trine's program is at a point where they need to schedule up. The 0.483 SOS they have right now is nowhere close to being where they will get any kind of consideration.

Trine has less of an excuse to underschedule than do Hope or Calvin, too, inasmuch as it's a lot easier from a travel standpoint to schedule the array of powerhouses in northeastern Ohio (John Carroll, CWRU, Mount Union, Wooster, etc.) to/from Angola than it is to/from Holland or Grand Rapids. And Trine is just as close to the Illinois and Wisconsin schools as are Calvin and Hope.

The rest of the league is more at a point where they should be hunting wins of any kind in their non-conference schedule. Too many at the bottom of the MIAA are taking on a much more difficult schedule than they are ready for. Adrian and Kalamazoo don't need to be playing Case Western Reserve, for instance. Too many cases of the bottom of the MIAA playing games they can't be expected to be competitive in. Games against Finlandia, the SLIAC, and the weaker Ohio and in-region Pennsylvania teams would be ideal.

I would add that there are a lot of Chicagoland teams that are good for this project as well. There's a quintet of NACC teams (Aurora, Benedictine, Concordia IL, Dominican, and Illinois Tech) and a MWC team (Lake Forest) that are options for mid- or lower-level MIAA teams that are looking to schedule more within their weight class, so to speak.

[ziggy]

MIAA has announced the quarterfinals are postponed to Thursday

Can they do Thursday - Saturday - Monday, or is that not an option? Does the tournament need to end by Saturday for selections?

Tournament selections are done Sunday night.  Sunday afternoon is an option for all but two MIAA schools.

This is where the MIAA should use Tuesday instead of Wed because you already have a potentially shortened calendar with Hope/Calvin and ya know its still February.

Makes sense.   Even though we know they aren't getting a Pool C bid this year, I guess they can't really leave one spot in the bracket for "MIAA champion".

There is a set deadline at some point Sunday for conferences to submit their automatic qualifier to the NCAA.

[ziggy]

Trine's program is at a point where they need to schedule up. The 0.483 SOS they have right now is nowhere close to being where they will get any kind of consideration.

Trine has less of an excuse to underschedule than do Hope or Calvin, too, inasmuch as it's a lot easier from a travel standpoint to schedule the array of powerhouses in northeastern Ohio (John Carroll, CWRU, Mount Union, Wooster, etc.) to/from Angola than it is to/from Holland or Grand Rapids. And Trine is just as close to the Illinois and Wisconsin schools as are Calvin and Hope.

I don't want to go too hard at Trine because I'm guessing they were counting on more of an SOS boost from their GLI participation and WIAC trip than they ended up getting. I do still think they have some room to build a schedule more on par with what we usually see from Hope and Calvin and I would have thought they moved further in that direction with the success they've had now going back to the COVID year.