MBB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[Stertorous Thunder]

Greg, I'm with you now on Mason Funk being a first-team All-CCIW selection.  I had him second team along with Colak.  Cleveland still first team and likely MOP for the regular season. 

First team:  Vanlandingham, Cleveland, Richardson, Ryan Johnson, Mason Funk . . . and ?

'70

And Trelenberg, Brooks, and Thomann.

I enjoy this time of year, debating the all-CCIW awards.

My first team:
Cleveland, IWU, MOP
Vanlandingham, NPU
Richardson, Whe
R. Johnson, CC
Trelenberg, Elm
McNabb, Mil
Brooks, CC

I predict unanimous selections for the first six on the list, especially the first four.  Brooks, Funk, Vuckovich, and AJ Johnson are all great players who deserve first team consideration, but they have teammates who get more attention and there aren't enough places for all of them so I think that three will fall to the second team.

I'm very confident of my top 11 players, but I haven't paid as much attention to CCIW basketball this year, so I could be way off on the final 5 spots.  I look forward to hearing other opinions.

My second team:
Funk, IWU
Vuckovich, NPU
AJ Johnson, CC
Thomann, Mil
Adjahoungbeta, Elm
Colak, IWU
VanderWoude, Whe
Smith, CU

Honorable mention:
Straughter, Mil
McNabb, CU
Bullock, NCC
Diaz, NCC

To me, Augie didn't have a single star who stood out above his teammates, so they could be lacking an all-conference representative.  Bullock and Diaz are great, but last place teams don't usually get honors unless they have an obvious first teamer.

[Gregory Sager]

All good points on All-CCIW, Greg.  I don't know the other teams well enough to really fill it all out.

I respect that, Mark.

I enjoy this time of year, debating the all-CCIW awards.

My first team:
Cleveland, IWU, MOP
Vanlandingham, NPU
Richardson, Whe
R. Johnson, CC
Trelenberg, Elm
McNabb, Mil
Brooks, CC

Why did you only list seven?

To me, Augie didn't have a single star who stood out above his teammates, so they could be lacking an all-conference representative.

I think they'll give Augie a second-team slot, just for form's sake, since Delp's boys will at worst go 5-11. I think it'll probably be Klaver.

[Stertorous Thunder]

Why did you only list seven?

I think they'll give Augie a second-team slot, just for form's sake, since Delp's boys will at worst go 5-11. I think it'll probably be Klaver.

I guess I'm running on fumes at the end of a crazy week at work.  I would pick Vuckovich as my final first teamer, but the voters will probably give it to Funk.  Since there's one more open spot that I hadn't counted, your prediction of a Quad Cities Viking on the second team makes sense.

Vuckovich's season was just fantastic. I wouldn't have thought a player could improve that much from one season to the next.  A worthy winner of the fictional most-improved CCIW player award.

But as for real awards, is Carson Grier from Wheaton the First Year Student-Athlete of the Year? Or did I miss someone else who was more worthy?

[Gregory Sager]

Why did you only list seven?

I think they'll give Augie a second-team slot, just for form's sake, since Delp's boys will at worst go 5-11. I think it'll probably be Klaver.

I guess I'm running on fumes at the end of a crazy week at work.  I would pick Vuckovich as my final first teamer, but the voters will probably give it to Funk.  Since there's one more open spot that I hadn't counted, your prediction of a Quad Cities Viking on the second team makes sense.

Vuckovich's season was just fantastic. I wouldn't have thought a player could improve that much from one season to the next.  A worthy winner of the fictional most-improved CCIW player award.

But as for real awards, is Carson Grier from Wheaton the First Year Student-Athlete of the Year? Or did I miss someone else who was more worthy?

I'll gladly take your cue, as I don't think I've pushed my pet project enough recently , but, yeah, I've stumped for a long time now for the CCIW to adopt a Most Improved Player award and a Defensive Player of the Year award. This season it'd be pretty open-and-shut in both cases: Mike Vuckovic has upped his game from 2024-25 to 2025-26 about as dramatically as I've seen anyone in this league do in many, many years. And Mason Funk leads the league in both blocks and steals, so he'd be a no-brainer for the mythical DPOY award.

First-Year Student-Athlete of the Year (man, I hate how the league renamed the awards) is an interesting question, because changing it to "First-Year" instead of "Freshman" or "Newcomer" makes it less specific. Does it literally mean "first year as a student-athlete" or is "student-athlete" just the CCIW's "Look how focused we are on academics, everybody!" euphemism for someone who plays the sport in question? If it's just a show-offy term for a player, then Noah Cleveland is going to win that award going away, because this is his first season as a basketball player even though he's an academic sophomore. But if we take the "student" part of "student-athlete" literally, then it has to be someone who is in his first year of college. And the interesting thing is that the class of '29 has thus far produced a really good crop of contributing freshmen for the league: Carson Grier, Peyton McKenna, Luke Smith, and Marquis Vance would all be worthy candidates in any year, and this season the league has four guys of that caliber. In a pinch I'd probably give the award to Grier, but all four of them are worthy.