And even for a Badger fan like me that grinds me. There are at least three or four teams in the Horizon that are as capable of winning a game or two in the NCAA tournament (or would be if fairly seeded) as the teams that get in at the end of the pack from the P5 conferences. Then look at the "high mid" leagues. The NBE is likely to get four and could even get five teams in. You're telling me that Providence, Butler or Creighton are any better than Oakland or Wright (or GB or us on a given night)? I don't buy it.
Thank God you didn't put this nonsense out there with your role on the radio.
Providence rated 56
Butler 58
Creighton 87
Oakland 113 - let that sink in for a second
Green Bay 143 - let that sink in for a second
Wright State 158 - let that sink in for a second
Providence's worst loss? Two teams in the 100's. Meanwhile Oakland has lost to Youngstown State (274th) and Northern Kentucky (283rd). The same is true with the other schools.
You are laughable. You don't have to buy it, the rest of the world gets it.
Look, we get it, you're having a rough time accepting that your team, which isn't all that good, has the best thing it has going for it headed to the NBA in a couple months despite the fact that you haven't won anything with him.
If you want to get all up in the numbers, how about we take a look at Marquette's?
(using RPIForecast)RPI: 113
This is respectable for a low-tier high-major program. That RPI gets buoyed by playing 7 top-100 schools in a pretty good conference that is the Big East. I'm happy that all the private hoops schools were able to get together and move forward. But if I'm the rest of the conference, I'm pretty annoyed at Marquette.
Why, you ask? Well, Marquette is probably the school most-responsible for the Big East being #4 in the RPI rather than higher, in turn possibly knocking down the number of bids for the conference.
How is that? Easy. While the elite Big East schools, Villanova and Xavier, went out and actually played difficult non-conference schedules, Marquette cowered in their little fox-hole Bradley Center and refused to play any tough mid-majors away from home. Belmont was the only tough mid you took on, and look what happened. This is the same Belmont that lost to Cleveland State (we swept CSU).
Where does avoiding strong mid-majors leave MU's non-conference SOS? Looks like it's going to end up at 322, one of the worst 30 non-con schedules in the country.
You'd have to wonder where Marquette's non-conference SOS would be if they weren't forced to play Iowa as part of the new Gavitt Games, or their annual tilt with UW. Could they have gotten all the way to 351? Who knows. I just know they'd still be a lot closer to the basement than they'd be even to 300 out of 351.
But don't worry. It's fun to whoop up on low-majors like Jackson State, Grambling State, Maine, Presbyterian and Chicago State - a school that looks like it won't even exist after May 1st. To the uneducated Marquette fan, there's no difference between a low-major like Maine and a mid-major like Milwaukee. But if you had played a couple of these teams - maybe not us in the "lose-lose" situation but another mid-major in the 100-200 or even top-100 RPI level - perhaps you wouldn't be dragging down the Big East. That 18-11 record has to feel really cool - you can even puff out your chest because of the pretty solid 6 victories in the top 100.
Of course, 6 victories aren't so cool when they're countered with 11 losses against the same top 100.
That's okay, though. You've got a much better record against schools like us in the 100-200 range. You're a dominant 3-2.
You know what the difference is between you and us? Conference and time. Your school got into basketball much earlier than we did. Not the actual beginning of the program, because according to the records at each school we started our program 20 years before you did. I don't know whether or not to believe that, since nothing special happened at Marquette in the mid-1910's that would have caused them to 'start' the athletic program. Nothing happened, nothing at all.
That allowed you to get into the Big East, a conference that fits you guys perfectly. That's wonderful - because you can continue to prop up your program by building your NCAA Tournament resume based on sheer amount of games against actual good teams in your conference.
Damn good thing that Bo Ryan and Bruce Pearl came along to Milwaukee when they did instead of 10 years earlier, otherwise you'd practically have to take out a lease on our message board so you can come and tell us how much better you are by association to good programs. Damn good thing Steve Antrim's program fell apart after 1993, or else your post count might rival mine.
Note that the post count I'm referring to is all of your posts, not just the ones under "Gaseous Clay." Gaseous, indeed. A bladder full of hot air.
You're not as far ahead of us as you'd like to think. I know that eats at you, because otherwise why would you venture onto our board? You're coming from a program with the better conference, Yankees-like budget, the big attendance, the big shoe contract, the NBA players, Coach K's possible successor at the helm.
Maybe it's boredom. Maybe it's the Napoleonic complex that causes you to whip out your dick on other program's boards to put them in their place.
Maybe it is what it is - you're bothered because there's a school that has 30,000 kids on campus, 65,000 alumni in the area and 140,000 overall, no albatross football program hanging on its neck and a basketball program that has started to get a bit of traction in the last 15 years. You guys tried hard to knock down a building that could hold an elite mid-major program - it's no new Bucks Arena, but it's not unlike those at elite mid-major programs that have made a living out of smacking around middling high-major programs like your own, and you're scared that if this school ever figures out what basketball can be - the same thing that your university figured out decades ago - that it's going to be a monster that's going to cut you down to size, a school with few local alumni and a relatively small student body with a future of looking forward to the evenly matched archrivalry series with DePaul.
The fun part is, we haven't figured it out yet. Our administration and faculty haven't quite understood what basketball can mean for them, and their workplace. They don't know what they could have on their hands if only they supported it. Lovell gets it now, because he's over there now. Could you imagine if he had been a Vice President at MU, understood what hoops could do and became our chancellor? One day, it's going to happen. Our chancellor's office is going to have someone that knows what a basketball team can do for their enrollment, applications, alumni engagement and student retention. We'll have someone who will wield the basketball program like a weapon in the fight for growth and expansion.
When that day comes, the day you dread, is when your boys won't be able to avoid us any longer.
That is, if your boys are ever man enough to come out of the fox-hole and give us a real series.
You're here, like most MU fans who venture over, to put us down because one day you may not be able to get your hands on top of our broad shoulders to put us down.
Enjoy it.