trueblue32

The compliance office account recently followed him on Twitter for whatever that's worth. Mading and Prather followed each other recently as well

Maybe the most important thing to me today is having Mballa/Hardnett/Skogman knock down some outside shots. Important for the trajectory of the season, but also I want Michigan to have tape showing that they can't drop Dickinson in ball screen coverage. If Michigan can get away with letting him clog the paint all game we don't stand a chance, they were #3 in 2-point defense last year.

I swear I was gonna post this whenever the Michigan thread started lol. Zaakir Williamson has some highlights of him scoring on your cousin at 1:26, 1:34, 1:45, 2:14, and 2:36 in this video. Not to disparage Dickinson but rather show Williamson against high level competition. I'd imagine he redshirts but he won’t be seeing anyone 7’2” when he starts playing in the MAC

Well that significantly decreases the intrigue of this game lol. Hopefully we get plenty of Mading/Jones/Blocker/Williamson minutes

I figured I'd get a game thread going for the first game (even if it's an exhibition) in person in a couple years. I gotta reiterate how I appreciate that we always get Daemen for exhibitions as they are a great D2 program that would beat a lot of lower level D1 teams. Daemen is the de facto #38 ranked D2 team as the 13th team receiving votes. They have already played 3 games beating the de facto #26 team, and losing to the #4 team by 11 points, and #3 team by 3 points. Their big man Andrew Sischo was a first team all-American. He's averaged 18.3 PPG and 9.0 RPG in his 3 career exhibition games against us. I've always wished we could poach him off of Daemen lol

Rigsby holding a UB decorated guitar doing one of the photo shoots that recruits do in uniform on their visits.

Yeah for a while they ran shuttles from the dorms to the games. I think it's a good idea, but it shows how easy you have to make it for a large percentage of students to get to a game. If people weren't taking the Stampede to the union and walking to Alumni from there, I'm not banking on them taking the Stampede, walking to the subway, riding the subway, then walking into Key Bank.

Sounding likely we get WKU and MTSU. From a conference standpoint, this is a good boost I think in basketball talent, however this won't get us out of one-bid territory so we're just adding more competition which isn't ideal. KenPom has a Program Rank metric that ranks programs based on his data going back to 1997. This round of realignment would see the MAC receive a slight bump in average Program Rank, although the conference doesn't move up at all in the conference rankings:

https://www.instagram.com/stories/keishawn3/2696759708094531203/ Rigsby was on campus for an official (presumably) visit this weekend

Saint Louis’ best player

More quotes from Whitesell in this video: https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=880536935929458 Notably he mentioned that Hardnett has competition from Skogman to start, Jones is ready to play a lot of PG minutes and Mading is making a bid for a lot of minutes. I think all of this was semi-expected, but it's exciting to hear him speak highly of younger guys. We know what we have in the returners but if they're being outplayed by young guys I think that's what takes us from #77 in KenPom last year to having the ceiling of a bubble-caliber team.

NIT field was half the size that it usually is. They would’ve been in in a normal year regardless

Hurley won 0 P5 games. While you view a 12 seed as the “promised land” that’s really not concerning to a P6 team. We also had 0 track record of maintaining that year after year. ‘19 is the first year we beat 2 P6s, ‘20 we beat 1 P6. ‘21 was a short COVID year, meh. Edit: also the most likely Cancun 2nd game is top 100 Saint Louis, and Id bet on UCI finishing top 100

Single game tix for Bonaventure are on sale. Not a ton of tix left on the primary market: https://mpv.tickets.com/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=23_bonnies_mbb_single_game_tickets_on_sale_now&utm_term=2021-10-20&agency=STBON_MPV&orgid=3535&pid=8970685#/event/8970685/seatmap/?selectBuyers=false&minPrice=18&maxPrice=38&quantity=2&sort=price_desc&ada=false&seatSelection=true&onlyCoupon=true&onlyVoucher=false Just grabbed our tix for a group of 5. Hope to see more UB fans there!

The reason I personally want to move to a different conference is it just raises the floor of the athletic department. The number of G5 schools that have had sustained success in FBS football OR basketball is small. The number of G5 schools that have had sustained success in FBS football AND basketball is smaller. The number of G5 schools that have had sustained success in FBS football AND basketball on MAC exposure/budget/fan support is 0. It's a nice theoretical to say let's just hang around the MAC and dominate until the end of time but UB isn't the first MAC school to have a string of successful seasons, and all of those other "dynasties" have since ended. There are several things that lead to success, but recruiting is king. Recruits are interested in fan support, facilities (budget), exposure, and success. Obviously these things are all tied together, and moving to a better conference automatically raises the first three, and should in turn raise the fourth. It takes one bad hire to torpedo UB's image of success in the mind of a 17 year old recruit and then we're left with really nothing exceptional in the fan support, facilities (budget), and exposure categories. The issue for us is there's not really a strong group of regional G5 teams, with Temple and UMass pretty much being the only options without pushing further south. I would have hoped we would have gotten in the AAC as there's really not much potential for UB to move up without P5 conferences completely blowing up, and us ending up in a completely new conference with the leftovers: Syracuse, Rutgers, Pittsburgh, BC, etc.

I disagree, KenPom Tier A/B games serve as a decent proxy for Q1/Q2 games on an NCAA resume. We have 2 A tier and 2 B tier games as of now with the potential of playing Saint Louis as a likely B tier, possible A tier game. We also have two spots still open on the schedule. It lacks the P5 names but that’s the price of recent success. This is the best schedule imo we’ve been able to put together since we were Top 25. I also think the UC Irvine and the return WKU games are the most interesting home games (non-con/non-Big4) since probably South Dakota St in 2014

Was looking at my football tix and saw this listed as well. WBB has an exhibition against Daemen on 11/4, and MBB (presumably) had an un-announced exhibition that day as well. Went to the Daemen MBB schedule to see if it was against them and they do have the exhibition listed

Kenpom's preseason projections. Has us slipping to the 13th best conference, thanks to a particularly bad bottom of the conference this season. Huge drop off from Kent at 143 to Ball at 260

Yeah looks like his recruitment is taking off. Hopefully being in first means something

Kid has a 40" vert and shot 57% from 3 on a top 10 HS team and he had no D1 offers, that's wild. Reminds me of James Reese in that he's a good athlete/shooter but doesn't appear to do much off the dribble. It's good to get in as his first offer, I'd imagine he piles them up in JUCO

There's the first 3 games anyway

Reading Blue Ribbon Yearbook's Buffalo summary and here's some quotes that jumped out to me from Whitesell that give an idea of what some of the guys roles will be this year: On David Skogman “I think Skogman has great potential. This summer, he really made a jump. He’s much more confident. He can shoot the 3. He's got an opportunity to play heavy minutes with a chance to start.” On Kuluel Mading: "He's thin, but he's got a great upside. He can really run. He's more of a tall three than anything.” On Kidtrell Blocker: "He's got a lot of talent, he's got good potential, but he's a little bit behind because he missed a month of the summer” On Zaakir Williamson "He's a five/four, wide-body kid. We've got a lot of good depth inside, so it's a luxury for him to be able to take our time and develop him. He can get extra reps in practice -kind of what we did with David Skogman a couple years back.” He also mentions Brewton providing a spark off the bench, so presumably Jack will be starting with Skogman as an option for a bigger starting lineup.

7 months ago he released a top 5 with 4 HM and UB (we originally offered over 3 years ago), then he goes off the map and pops up at BG. Let's apply some common sense here. His recruiting pedigree has continually dropped too starting at 84 in February 2020 and currently sitting at 201 https://247sports.com/PlayerSport/Willie-Lightfoot-at-Sunrise-Christian-256369/RecruitRankHistory/

I don't have any inside info, but I feel pretty confidently that he doesn't have a committable offer from us anymore. Hasn't been any news on him visiting UB after being in his top 5 and our first commit in the class was at the same position. Seems like his recruitment his fallen off after early offers from Minnesota, Oregon, Alabama, Marquette, and us.