Both UWO and UWW have this week off in preparation for their clash up at Oshkosh on Sept 30. Huge game for both as the WIAC slate gets underway. Based on my limited experience seeing both teams, UWO is going to have their hands full up front on both sides.

I am always very wary of comparing one team's performance against another vs a common opponent. There are so many variables when you consider travel, matchups, injuries, gameplan, etc. I don't think there's much value in comparing the manner in which two teams lost to UWW (JCU and St Johns).

Another big game for the WIAC is Oshkosh @Wheaton. HansenRatings picks UWO to win the league and has them as the #4 team in the country. With Berghammer back and two dynamic WR's in Tetzlaff and Steger, along with Schwalbe at TE and a monster OL, UWO seems loaded. Raddatz is a premier safety in D3 and their defensive front has 6 starters back from a unit that led the WIAC in scoring defense and was top 25 in the country. Wheaton has Gio Weeks and a talented offense returning and some young dudes on defense along with an experienced secondary.

UWO reminds me a lot of Bethel from last year on both sides (Roste and Co = Berghammer, etc).

This will be a dogfight of a battle in the suburbs of Chicago this Saturday between two teams who both want to unseat the power team in two of the best conferences in the country.

Quote from: CuriousCCIWfan on August 22, 2023, 04:12:46 pm

How much will pressure be put on Luke to throw, it seemed that Greenfield took a lot of the defense's attention, and now they can put more pressure on Luke? But I know he still has the best receiver in D3. It will be fun to watch.

Wayne ruby is the even better receiver in d3

Based on what? Wayne Ruby is an outstanding WR and so is DeAngelo Hardy. I'd say these guys are very close and it is completely subjective to say one is better than the other.

Ruby played in a 50/50 run-pass offense and had significantly more targets than Hardy, who played in a 70% run 30% pass offense with a Gagliardi RB. If you break down the stats per catch, they are very similar. 

WashU has a chance to be good this year and equal or improve on their 8-3 record last year. They return 8 starters on the offensive side that was #18 nationally in total offense. QB Rush (#7 completion % and #6 Efficiency nationally), TB Hamilton (869 yds 7.0 ypc), WR's Goldberg (50 rec) and Hoyhtya (42 rec) all return along with 3 of 5 starting OL. Defensively they have 5 starters back including 2nd leading tackler LB Schmal 969 T) and 4 others that played significantly in every game. LB is the biggest area of concern for the Bears. WashU was ranked #2 in total defense in the CCIW last year.

They open on the road in Arkansas against Hendrix. They do play what's likely their two toughest games on the road @NCC and @Wheaton.

Quote from: wally_wabash on August 02, 2023, 06:21:41 pm

Quote from: emma17 on August 02, 2023, 11:14:34 am

Not a WIAC team in the preseason top 10, wonder how long it’s been since that happened?
It will be interesting to see the conference rankings this season. Although I do believe the WIAC is the toughest from top to bottom, they may not have the top end strength- at least to start the season.

Unless the WIAC gets positively drilled in all of their high profile September games, don't expect a change at the top of the conference rankings.

When do you release the conference rankings?
You’ll have some tough calls to make. Multiple WIAC teams have high profile September games, but in all of them the WIAC team would be the underdog- from a rankings perspective. It would stand to reason the WIAC could be 0-for in all those games.

I haven't  looked very closely at what Oshkosh has coming back but I would be surprised if they are an underdog @Wheaton with the Thunder needing to replace 9 defensive and 7 offensive starters. In addition, most of the backups to those departed seniors were also seniors (I think the Thunder return less than 10 players from their two deep out of 44 spots) so very little playing time returning for the Thunder. We will see how the talent evolves but this could be a rebuilding year for Wheaton, not really in a position to reload. If Wheaton is top 15, it's because of name only at this point.

Peyton Thorne, SR QB at Michigan State and son of former NCC HC Jeff Thorne, has entered the transfer portal and will be a graduate transfer, eligible immediately. It's late in the process for transfers so my guess is that Thorne already has a destination worked out.

Wheaton is looking for a new QB!

Quote from: USee on March 20, 2023, 06:17:40 pm

Quote from: Gregory Sager on March 20, 2023, 11:44:15 am

Quote from: USee on March 19, 2023, 12:26:42 pm

Quote from: kiko on March 18, 2023, 08:11:35 pm

This is well-deserved (as is the All-American recognition for Tyson Cruickshank and Matt Helwig).

Now I will bite my tongue about how Sean Smith wasn't even coach of the year in his own conference.  No disrespect to Mike Schauer, but the myopic tradition of simply handing this recognition to the coach of the regular season winner requires zero cognitive ability and does not reflect well on the conference's coaches.  It should be taken to a farm upstate where it has plenty of room to roam and to shoot baskets against the barn all day long.

I am thrilled for Sean Smith as NCOY. Well deserved. To be fair, the CCIW coaches awarded Mike Schauer COY (his first time ever as COY) prior to NPU winning the CCIW tourney and advancing to the sweet 16. Schauer's squad finished a game clear of NPU for the regular season title and he took a team picked 4th in the conference and went 14-2 in one of the toughest conferences in the nation. His team also happened to advance to the elite 8, losing to National Champ CNU by 6. No disrespect to Sean Smith, who is deserving as NCOY, I think Mike's award as COY was deserved at the time it was awarded and the idea he was given it as a gratuitous tradition by the other coaches diminishes what is probably his best coaching job as Wheaton's head coach.

I have no argument with the rest of your comment, but the part I bolded strays from defensiveness into misconception.

It's not an "idea" that the CCIW head coaches annually award the COY honor to the coach(es) of the team(s) that win the league. It's a fact. The CCIW's MBB history page amply demonstrates the near-perfect correspondence between the COY and the conference champion -- including, as you yourself pointed out, seasons in which there were co-champions, in which case the COY award was shared as well. The lone exception was 2003, the second year that the COY award was given out by the league. The CCIW title was shared by Augustana, Carthage, and Illinois Wesleyan that season, but the award was only given to Scott Trost of Illinois Wesleyan. It would be difficult to prove, given the closed-mouthedness of CCIW head coaches where league awards are concerned, but my guess is that the gentlemen's agreement among them to annually award the COY to the conference champion's mentor, even if it meant splitting the award among the coaches of co-champions, dates back to that year. It's only a theory, but, given the egos and the hypercompetitiveness of that generation of CCIW head coaches, it makes total sense.

As for the tradition being "gratuitous", that's an eye-of-the-beholder statement. I'm sure that, if pressed, the coaches would've said that locking the COY award to the final standings keeps the peace among the nine men involved. Now, kiko considers that policy to be "cowardly", and that, too, is a judgment call. I think that "negligent" or "unnuanced" or "diminishing" (or kiko's original choice, "myopic") would be a better adjective there. I think that the COY loses some of its juice by the fact that it is a de facto rubber-stamp of an award ... which is why I can understand your defensive stance here regarding Mike Schauer's worthiness. But kiko's right that Schauer's a perfectly fine choice for 2023 COY, too -- particularly since, as you said, the award was given out prior to the CCIW tourney.

Quote from: USee on March 19, 2023, 07:11:44 pm

I think it has to be more than “perfectly fine choice” to give it to anyone besides the clear conference winner.  How many times has there been a no brainer winner that wasn’t the regular season champ? I wouldn’t have voted for Soderberg over Ron rose

Disagree ... and since you're a football guy I'm rather surprised to see you say this, given that the CCIW football coaches refuse to rubber-stamp their COY award and will award it on occasion to a coach whose program makes huge strides forward rather than merely giving it to a champion coach whose powerhouse program simply performed as expected. I seem to remember that the posters on the CCIW football board have talked before about how it's a good thing that the CCIW football coaches do it that way, in stark contrast to their hidebound basketball coaching brethren.

I'm not sure that the world would come to an end if the CCIW MBB coaches broke with tradition and adopted the more open-ended attitude of their football colleagues. There's been wholesale turnover in the MBB coaching ranks in this league in recent seasons; with Carroll's pending new hire, six of the nine CCIW head coaching jobs will have turned over since the Covid pandemic struck. It seems to me that the new breed of coaches don't have quite the sharp elbows of their predecessors as far as personal rivalries are concerned. This could be the perfect time for the new generation to set the old gentlemen's agreement aside and start awarding the COY based upon what they view as merit -- even if there isn't 100% consensus as to how that merit is measured -- rather than maintain a custom that only diminishes the award by making it automatic.

Greg,

You make some good points and I mostly agree with your discourse here. I would point out two things:

1-My choice of the word gratuitous was not a misconception, rather a reaction to Kiko saying "...simply handing this recognition to the coach of the regular season winner requires zero cognitive ability and does not reflect well on the conference's coaches". I understand your feeling that this is a rote excercise but I have not heard that specifically from any of the coaches directly. That doesn't prove or disprove your assertion.

You're right, it doesn't. What does prove it is: a) the total correspondence between COY and league champion since 2003; and b) the fact that, in the second year of the award, only one coach among the three championship coaches was given the award, and this involved some pretty obvious personal rivalries among outspoken men with very strong opinions and considerable egos (qualities very much in keeping with their generation of basketball coaches).

Two-decades-plus of total correspondence between award and standings is too much of a proven trend to be viewed as a mere coincidence. I don't view this as a "feeling" on my part, or on kiko's part, or on the part of anybody else who's spoken about the rubber-stamp nature of the CCIW MBB COY over the years. I view it as a logical deduction based upon totally compelling evidence, as well as a few cryptic allusions made to it by coaches and SIDs in the past.

Quote from: USee on March 20, 2023, 06:17:40 pm

2-Football is a very different animal. Most years there isn't a "co-COY" award because teams play each other just once and the winner gets it over the loser if there is a tie at the top. There have been 3.5 exceptions since 1978 to the COY CCIW football award that I am aware of. In 1982 NCC's Lloyd Krumlauf went 6-1-1 in 1982 (Augie went 8-0), Paul Krohn was awarded Co-COY after going 3-4 in his last year as head coach at Elmhurst (Swider was also awarded it as conference champion), Mike Conway was given the COY title in 2013 after going 3-4 in the league, and in 2018 Larry Kindbom was given the award after going 7-2 in WashU's first year in the league (NCC and IWU were 8-1). That's really only 3 times in 45 years the football champion wasn't at least Co-COY.

... but twice within the last decade. That's a stark contrast to the track record of the MBB coaches.

(Is it the sports version of a mixed metaphor if I refer to "the track record of the MBB coaches"?  )

I can see where there were some strong egos back in 2003 that led to no discussion or consideration in the process. None of those people are still coaching so I am not sure how this alleged conspiracy continues. I can tell you that in football, in 1982 Lloyd Krumlauf was awarded COY after finishing 2nd because the undefeated coach, Augie's Bob Reade (RIP), asked the other coaches to vote for Lloyd because he thought he deserved it. I can also tell you that Mike Conway won in 2013 because John Thorne and Mike Swider basically demanded the other coaches vote for him. The same thing happened in 2018 for Larry Kindbom.

Although there is no love lost between several of the CCIW football coaches, as you note, the sentiment among basketball coaches was very different with egos ruling the day way back when. I can't imagine Dennie Bridges telling the other coaches that Bosko deserved COY over him. And no one was going to bat for Grey Giovanne.  I don't think that's true now. I don't know if the Schauer vote this year was unanimous but I do know the Conway and Lindbom votes were definitely not unanimous. I just don't see the deductive reasoning that tells me the CCIW coaches vote is a rubber stamp today the way it was in 2003. I get the egos involved back then. But as you note, if there was some rubber stamp process there is enough of us in the know that would have heard more specifics. Otherwise how does Kramer Soderberg, Tom Jessee, Anthony Figueroa, Taylor Jannsen, and Sean Smith become part of the cabal? Certinly Bosko Jr and John Baines have enough experience that they may know where the "train station" is, but for me, it's hard to get on board with a multiple decades long rubber stamp without more compelling evidence. It is possible in my mind that this year there were two nominees and the coaches considered Schauer's resume (at that point) better than Sean Smith's. I would suspect if the vote was a week later, the result might have been flipped.