Lamenting the state of MAC basketball...

[Antimob]

So let me get this straight...the conference no longer has a tiny handful of bottom of the roster fringe NBA players so ipso facto MAC basketball has "declined."

Since that hypothesis was first proffered a MAC team went on to soundly defeat a team in the NCAA tournament that featured the number one overall pick in the NBA Draft. So much for the presence or absence of single players defining the quality of play for a team, let alone a conference as a whole. Plus, that same team that defeated the Power 5 heavyweight with the big bad NBA behemoth was and is regularly challenged from teams in their own league, see BGSU Stroh Center 2 February 2019.

How would Gary Trent have fared against an athlete like Nick Perkins or James Thompson? We'll never know, but as a whole the MAC players are unquestionably bigger, faster and more skilled than they've ever been. That's hardly a decline.

[Rollo83]

So let me get this straight...the conference no longer has a tiny handful of bottom of the roster fringe NBA players so ipso facto MAC basketball has "declined."

Since that hypothesis was first proffered a MAC team went on to soundly defeat a team in the NCAA tournament that featured the number one overall pick in the NBA Draft. So much for the presence or absence of single players defining the quality of play for a team, let alone a conference as a whole. Plus, that same team that defeated the Power 5 heavyweight with the big bad NBA behemoth was and is regularly challenged from teams in their own league, see BGSU Stroh Center 2 February 2019.

How would Gary Trent have faired against an athlete like Nick Perkins or James Thompson? We'll never know, but as a whole the MAC players are unquestionably bigger, faster and more skilled than they've ever been. That's hardly a decline.

Faster and bigger? Maybe. Technologically, genes, training, nutrition all probably lead to eventual evolution in all sports.

More skilled? Never! Trent would have eaten their lunch under the boards and on the glass twelve ways to Sunday. So would have Harper, Szczerbiak, Daniels, Wells, Kool, and most of the Kent State "Sweet 16" team of 2002. Don't see anyone at that "skill level" right now in MAC.

Period!

[hammb]

So let me get this straight...the conference no longer has a tiny handful of bottom of the roster fringe NBA players so ipso facto MAC basketball has "declined."

Since that hypothesis was first proffered a MAC team went on to soundly defeat a team in the NCAA tournament that featured the number one overall pick in the NBA Draft. So much for the presence or absence of single players defining the quality of play for a team, let alone a conference as a whole. Plus, that same team that defeated the Power 5 heavyweight with the big bad NBA behemoth was and is regularly challenged from teams in their own league, see BGSU Stroh Center 2 February 2019.

How would Gary Trent have faired against an athlete like Nick Perkins or James Thompson? We'll never know, but as a whole the MAC players are unquestionably bigger, faster and more skilled than they've ever been. That's hardly a decline.

Faster and bigger? Maybe. Technologically, genes, training, nutrition all probably lead to eventual evolution in all sports.

More skilled? Never! Trent would have eaten their lunch under the boards and on the glass twelve ways to Sunday. So would have Harper, Szczerbiak, Daniels, Wells, Kool, and most of the Kent State "Sweet 16" team of 2002. Don't see anyone at that "skill level" right now in MAC.

Period!

Just read through the scheduling thread in the football forum. You'll quickly see that this poster is clueless when it comes to MAC basketball.

This post just doubled down on the cluelessness.

[Flipper]

Basketball in general sucks nowadays...the skill level isn't there in the colleges and it isn't there in the NBA.

[Antimob]

Funny, I did not see a refutation of my argument by hammb, just an ad hominem attack. What's clueless is saying the MAC is bad because there's not as many NBA players only to then have a MAC team beat Arizona and DeAndre Ayton in the NCAA tournament.

[Globetrotter]

Funny, I did not see a refutation of my argument by hammb, just an ad hominem attack. What's clueless is saying the MAC is bad because there's not as many NBA players only to then have a MAC team beat Arizona and DeAndre Ayton in the NCAA tournament.

Who is this guy? Are he and hooper the same? I wonder if 1 is Gmartin?

[hammb]

Funny, I did not see a refutation of my argument by hammb, just an ad hominem attack. What's clueless is saying the MAC is bad because there's not as many NBA players only to then have a MAC team beat Arizona and DeAndre Ayton in the NCAA tournament.

I didn't think your point needed refuted. IT was so painfully, obviously wrong, it was hardly worth the time it took to post my response. It's also nearly impossible to put forth a fact based argument for EITHER side of the aisle. You make the blanket statement that a single MAC team beat a single top flight P5 team with the #1 pick in the draft in a single game and tout that as concrete evidence the MAC is better now than it was 20 years ago. How the hell can anybody possibly refute that?

This is what you do. You put forth a single data point as evidence and draw it as a definitive conclusion for whatever preconceived notion you want to be true.

I don't, and never will, dispute that the last 2 years Buffalo is in the upper tier of MAC teams historically. The rest of the league has not been nearly as good as what the depth of the league was in the late 90s/early 00s. Your statement about bottom of the roster fringe NBA players shows how clueless you are about the league back then, these guys were definitely above "fringe NBA players":

Bonzi Wells played for 10 years in the NBA, averaged 12 ppg, and played over 20 mpg in 8 of those seasons.
Gary Trent played for 9 years and aged really quickly, but in his first 5 years was a regular rotation player and contributor.
Antonio Daniels played for 13 years and over 20 mpg in 8 of them.
Earl Boykins played for 13 years, was a fringe guy for most of that, but did have a 4 year prime as a key contributor.
Wally Szczerbiak played for 10 years, over 20mpg in all of them, a regular starter for half of them, and made an all star team.
Kaman played 13 years, made an all star team, was over 20 mpg in 10 of them

These guys were not "fringe" players, but make no mistake the league also did have those fringe guys as well to round out the depth. Keith McLeod, Nate Huffman, Tamar Slay, Casey Shaw, etc WERE those fringe NBA talents who saw some time in the league and faded.

Meanwhile Richaun Holmes is the ONLY MAC alum currently in the NBA, fringe or otherwise.

[Antimob]

A single data point, really? More like an inconvenient yet salient fact that completely disproves and collapses the very premise of your argument.

As long as we're into using other metrics, why do you choose to solely measure talent by who happened to have played in the NBA? ("Played" being generous considering some of the stats you just provided) How about the overall percentage of MAC players playing professional basketball? I guarantee that figure has skyrocketed in the last 15 years. Recruiting? Buffalo landed a consensus Top 100 recruit in Jeenathan Williams and he barely plays for them. How many Top 100 recruits were signed in 1995?

As far as scheduling, it's the futile quixotic philosophy you advocate that has contributed to the MAC being a one-bid league. Rick Boyages, the former Director of Basketball Operations for the MAC, spoke of this fallacy several years ago when he pushed the league teams to schedule home-and-homes with conferences in the same stratosphere of their own budget as opposed to road games or three-for-one's with Power 5 teams that almost always end with losses. He said the biggest challenge was for the fan bases of league teams to educate themselves about the quality of basketball played outside the Power 5 and not get caught up in brand names. It's apparent that education process is ongoing.

[hammb]

A single data point, really? More like an inconvenient yet salient fact that completely disproves and collapses the very premise of your argument.

I'm sorry you fail to grasp this fact, but a single game is absolutely that, a single data point. I could just as easily say that the 2018-19 BG team that is having a great year in conference, but lost to an 8-20 Cleveland State team is an inconvenient yet salient fact that proves the MAC is awful.

When discussing the overall depth and quality of a conference a single game is irrelevant. It's like arguing against Climate change because it's cold today.

Unfortunately comparing teams, players, and conferences across eras is very difficult to quantify. I know a lot of folks that watch a lot of MAC basketball, and you're officially the only person I've ever heard that thinks the quality and depth of the conference is as good now as it was 20 years ago, so congrats.

As for the overall percentage playing professional ball, I don't know how to find the data, or I would out of pure curiosity. The NBA is a pretty good baseline since it is by far and away the best league in the world. Basketball has gotten a lot more popular over the past 20 years so I wouldn't be surprised if there are more players playing now in more leagues. Even then, I'm not certain I'd concede that point since I know that guys like Kline-Ruminski, Llaranaga, Stacey, Pardon, and Matela (just looking solely at BG) played professionally from back in that era. Wouldn't be surprised if the rest of the MAC had plenty of guys playing overseas back then as well.

[Antimob]

The point is that basketball is a team game. No, the MAC teams of late haven't had a tiny handful of random NBA players that found limited minutes at the next level but that doesn't mean the quality of play or talent as a whole is worse due to this. If the NBA was the sole measurement as you posit Arizona would have not only won but dominated 100 times out of 100. They didn't. It isn't. The way NBA rosters are constructed has changed in the last 15 years and fewer MAC players have squeezed their way in. That fact in and of itself does not automatically mean MAC basketball has declined.

Of course there were really good players back then but even they may concede that they wouldn't match up with today's players from an athletic standpoint . Go #1-12 on a MAC roster today and you'll find superior height/speed to those that played 20 years ago. We can debate whether that's a definitive advantage compared with the skill and craftiness of a Gary Trent or Stacey but it's certainly not an absolute that it's worse. Those moves Trent made back in the day might have been thwarted if it was Zeke Marshall or someone of his ilk he was going against instead. Some find women's basketball more appealing because it's more about skill and less about athleticism. If skill has declined it's endemic to the game of basketball in general as Flipper said and not exclusively a MAC affliction.

[Antimob]

Funny, I did not see a refutation of my argument by hammb, just an ad hominem attack. What's clueless is saying the MAC is bad because there's not as many NBA players only to then have a MAC team beat Arizona and DeAndre Ayton in the NCAA tournament.

Who is this guy? Are he and hooper the same? I wonder if 1 is Gmartin?

[naandre]

The point is that basketball is a team game. No, the MAC teams of late haven't had a tiny handful of random NBA players that found limited minutes at the next level but that doesn't mean the quality of play or talent as a whole is worse due to this. If the NBA was the sole measurement as you posit Arizona would have not only won but dominated 100 times out of 100. They didn't. It isn't. The way NBA rosters are constructed has changed in the last 15 years and fewer MAC players have squeezed their way in. That fact in and of itself does not automatically mean MAC basketball has declined.

Of course there were really good players back then but even they may concede that they wouldn't match up with today's players from an athletic standpoint . Go #1-12 on a MAC roster today and you'll find superior height/speed to those that played 20 years ago. We can debate whether that's a definitive advantage compared with the skill and craftiness of a Gary Trent or Stacey but it's certainly not an absolute that it's worse. Those moves Trent made back in the day might have been thwarted if it was Zeke Marshall or someone of his ilk he was going against instead. Some find women's basketball more appealing because it's more about skill and less about athleticism. If skill has declined it's endemic to the game of basketball in general as Flipper said and not exclusively a MAC affliction.

That's not the point, the teams in the MAC 20 years ago were better relative to the teams in other conferences 20 years ago than current MAC teams are relative to current teams in other conferences, that is the only thing that is relevant to this discussion. We know this is true because 20 years ago professional talent evaluators routinely selected players from the MAC ahead of players from other conferences; 3 times in 5 years the MAC got multiple NCAA bids; MAC teams received higher tournament seeds then they do now; winning tournament games was a routine occurrence; Sports Illustrated was doing multi page spreads on how much talent was in the MAC; and ESPN was doing multiple features. You can say that the MAC is more athletic now than it was 20 years ago, but every conference in the country can say that as well. What you can't say is that MAC is better relative to the rest of the NCAA than it was 20 years ago.

[zete]

Lamenting MAC basketball..........Buffalo 114 -- Div II Ohio U 67

[hammb]

The point is that basketball is a team game. No, the MAC teams of late haven't had a tiny handful of random NBA players that found limited minutes at the next level but that doesn't mean the quality of play or talent as a whole is worse due to this. If the NBA was the sole measurement as you posit Arizona would have not only won but dominated 100 times out of 100. They didn't. It isn't. The way NBA rosters are constructed has changed in the last 15 years and fewer MAC players have squeezed their way in. That fact in and of itself does not automatically mean MAC basketball has declined.

Of course there were really good players back then but even they may concede that they wouldn't match up with today's players from an athletic standpoint . Go #1-12 on a MAC roster today and you'll find superior height/speed to those that played 20 years ago. We can debate whether that's a definitive advantage compared with the skill and craftiness of a Gary Trent or Stacey but it's certainly not an absolute that it's worse. Those moves Trent made back in the day might have been thwarted if it was Zeke Marshall or someone of his ilk he was going against instead. Some find women's basketball more appealing because it's more about skill and less about athleticism. If skill has declined it's endemic to the game of basketball in general as Flipper said and not exclusively a MAC affliction.

That's not the point, the teams in the MAC 20 years ago were better relative to the teams in other conferences 20 years ago than current MAC teams are relative to current teams in other conferences, that is the only thing that is relevant to this discussion. We know this is true because 20 years ago professional talent evaluators routinely selected players from the MAC ahead of players from other conferences; 3 times in 5 years the MAC got multiple NCAA bids; MAC teams received higher tournament seeds then they do now; winning tournament games was a routine occurrence; Sports Illustrated was doing multi page spreads on how much talent was in the MAC; and ESPN was doing multiple features. You can say that the MAC is more athletic now than it was 20 years ago, but every conference in the country can say that as well. What you can't say is that MAC is better relative to the rest of the NCAA than it was 20 years ago.

[zete]

https://www.cleveland.com/sports/colleg ... tates.html" target="_blank

That game was as close to getting beat UNLV would come as they cruised to the National Title from there out.