Iup basketball

[Chuck Norris]

While I certainly don’t expect to see that type of shooting every night, it’s nice to know the capability is there. I never would’ve believed a performance like that was possible 24 hours ago. Honestly with the possible exception of Gannon, who I admittedly haven’t actually watched yet, there probably isn’t a team in the west that IUP can’t beat, but there’s also, with the possible exception of Edinboro, not a team that can’t beat them. In the end though, I think they still face the same question as when Dallis and Clarke were playing. Can anybody outside the big 3 score when those guys aren’t cooking?

[IUPbigINDIANS]

BTW, rumor is they think Clarke is going to win his appeal and could be cleared to return very quickly (by next game).

[IUPbigINDIANS]

As far as IUP is concerned, I think it was more about it being one of those nights and I thought a favorable matchup. Shepherd looked very slow to me. They have some big bodies but they don’t move well and struggled to defend IUP’s quick guards. IUP defended very well though and I think that’s what can be counted on moving forward more than the offense. Few teams are going to go 16-23 from deep consistently. I was surprised that Joe went to the press so much with a thin bench. Credit to the players for being able to maintain pressure throughout. They never seemed to tire. I also thought Waldo did a nice job defending at mid court in the press. His long wingspan made it difficult on Shepherd getting the ball across.

Cal fighting injury issues again. Interesting.

You could tell early Shepherd had no idea who Bryce was until he lit them up in the first half. Second half they adjusted to him which opened up Stewart and Ethan. Of course, Bryce just started hitting them from deeper.

Needless to say he'll get a lot of attention moving forward.

Shepherd was fresh off a win against Mercyhurst and has played some others pretty tough.

Last night anyway I thought IUP's intensity caught them off guard.

That was a real big game for Stewart, too. Nice to see him finally have a green light.

Obviously they won't shoot like that every night but in a painful season it was nice to see them have a big night. They smothered Shepherd's two top guards. McCain-Corley was visibly frustrated.

[EyeoftheHawk]

Wow. Some really weird results in the league tonight. I'm not shocked that IUP won, but I am surprised by the margin and the amazing shooting percentage. Maybe they've stumbled into something, or maybe it was just one of those nights.

West Chester and Shepherd continue to be two of the most puzzling teams in the PSAC. You have no idea how either of them are going to come out night to night. Missing starters for Cal or not, that was a big win for the Rams.

And I certainly didn't see UPJ getting torrid against the Raiders tonight. Ship is getting killed on the boards and I don't think I ever thought I'd see the day when a Chris Fite team had given up 90 points or more in five games before the halfway mark of the season. Donovan Hill can't get into the lineup soon enough.

As far as IUP is concerned, I think it was more about it being one of those nights and I thought a favorable matchup. Shepherd looked very slow to me. They have some big bodies but they don’t move well and struggled to defend IUP’s quick guards. IUP defended very well though and I think that’s what can be counted on moving forward more than the offense. Few teams are going to go 16-23 from deep consistently. I was surprised that Joe went to the press so much with a thin bench. Credit to the players for being able to maintain pressure throughout. They never seemed to tire. I also thought Waldo did a nice job defending at mid court in the press. His long wingspan made it difficult on Shepherd getting the ball across.

Cal fighting injury issues again. Interesting.

[IUPbigINDIANS]

Wow. Some really weird results in the league tonight. I'm not shocked that IUP won, but I am surprised by the margin and the amazing shooting percentage. Maybe they've stumbled into something, or maybe it was just one of those nights.

West Chester and Shepherd continue to be two of the most puzzling teams in the PSAC. You have no idea how either of them are going to come out night to night. Missing starters for Cal or not, that was a big win for the Rams.

And I certainly didn't see UPJ getting torrid against the Raiders tonight. Ship is getting killed on the boards and I don't think I ever thought I'd see the day when a Chris Fite team had given up 90 points or more in five games before the halfway mark of the season. Donovan Hill can't get into the lineup soon enough.

I watched the second half of Cal vs WCU. The Rams went insane in the second half ... scoring 60-some and hitting everything.

Cal had more bad news. Starting PG Whitehead appeared to roll his ankle pretty badly and missed the final 8-9 minutes. Palek and Polak weren't dressed, nor was reserve big Hannah.

[Ship69]

Radford went 8 for 11 from deep and 7 of those were beyond NBA range.

I think they hit 16 of 23 from deep.

That was also a great defensive performance holding them to 48. They made them work for every single shot.

Wow. Some really weird results in the league tonight. I'm not shocked that IUP won, but I am surprised by the margin and the amazing shooting percentage. Maybe they've stumbled into something, or maybe it was just one of those nights.

West Chester and Shepherd continue to be two of the most puzzling teams in the PSAC. You have no idea how either of them are going to come out night to night. Missing starters for Cal or not, that was a big win for the Rams.

And I certainly didn't see UPJ getting torrid against the Raiders tonight. Ship is getting killed on the boards and I don't think I ever thought I'd see the day when a Chris Fite team had given up 90 points or more in five games before the halfway mark of the season. Donovan Hill can't get into the lineup soon enough.

[IUPalum]

Great defensive effort tonight!

[IUPbigINDIANS]

What in the hell did we just see? Who had IUP +30 tonight? Radford gets off the couch to tie the school record for 3’s with 8. I can’t recall seeing an IUP team in recent history shoot the ball that well. I really don’t have the words.

Radford went 8 for 11 from deep and 7 of those were beyond NBA range.

I think they hit 16 of 23 from deep.

That was also a great defensive performance holding them to 48. They made them work for every single shot.

[EyeoftheHawk]

What in the hell did we just see? Who had IUP +30 tonight? Radford gets off the couch to tie the school record for 3’s with 8. I can’t recall seeing an IUP team in recent history shoot the ball that well. I really don’t have the words.

[IUPbigINDIANS]

Bryce and Stewart went bonkers.

78-48 Final

[Cobra Hawks]

Decent 1st half against Shepherd . Much better than ESU game. Good defensive play and the guards making their shots especially Bryce

[IUPbigINDIANS]

My question at this point is more regarding roster construction and not necessarily with roster management. I think there was a pretty clear understanding that this team was going to be different than the last four. I recognize that at this point there are injuries and other factors, but this team at this stage is just bad. Not sure how else to describe them. And it makes me ask this question... How did it get here?

To be clear, I think the critical domino that put this team in this position was the unexpected transfer of Tomiwa after last year. Even with this roster, they are probably way better with him on the team.

But I do question what Joe is evaluating, or what he thinks he's getting, with many of the guys he's bringing in. We talk about the "Joe Doghouse" and him not playing guys. Jaheim Bathea was hyped as perhaps the best high school PG he ever recruited. He played in like 4 games and Joe tossed him to Siberia. We have Dolan Waldo this year. Those are just two very, very recent examples. But it seems as though he's missing on a ton of high school recruits. He has a higher hit rate on some of the international guys he brings from the prep ranks (Cobo, Tomiwa, Marcel, etc.) and the multi-year D1 transfers (Jones, Morris, etc.). From a foundational perspective, it's going to be much, much harder to both get and keep the multi-year guys transferring down. You simply have to be able to identify high school talent who can play for your program. And I'm not saying that as though he's not gotten great high school players (Ethan Porterfield, Malik Miller, Armoni Foster, etc.). It does seem though that the quality of guy he is brining in seems to be dropping, and he seems to be giving up on those guys way earlier than before.

I guess my ultimate point here is that it seems that there are valid questions regarding multiple things:
1) How did this roster (at this program) have so little high end talent (with the understanding that this was going to be a "down" year)?
2) Why does it seem like so many of the highly hyped high school recruits of late seem to not live up to it?
3) Why do those guys seem to get benched so quickly and not provided game action to figure it out at the college level?

I'm not necessarily saying I am pinning everything on Joe (although I don't think he's done a great job this year). It is just pretty wild to me how bad this entire team is. That just doesn't happen overnight.

Those questions have very long answers.

In short, track the recruiting since Cantens, Woodall and Fudala have left. Also note Joe is only allowed (1) paid assistant now. I think you'll find your answer.

[IUPbigINDIANS]

Shepherd's matchup against IUP gets a ton better with Dillard and Clarke out as the strength of the Rams team is at guard, led by Dan McClain-Corley and Phillip Jordan. I thought that McClain-Corley was one of the harder guards to defend one-on-one of any Ship played last season.

Shepherd is so sporadic but IUP usually gets every teams best shot. That will be especially true this year. Joe will have a long list of West teams ready to tee off on him.

They'll really struggle to contain McClain-Corley tomorrow night. Petteno and Stewart will have their hands full.

By default, Petteno is a guard again. We may see some improvement from him as he won't be worrying about getting yanked constantly. There's nobody behind him.

IUP's other guards left standing, Radford and Lambert, are going to really struggle against bigger lineups. At best both are in the 5'10" range (regardless of what that program says). Good offensive players but neither is very strong on defense.

Joe has to devise a plan to win games 53-49.

That's why I further like adding Romero-Sanz. Go big and play turtle slow.

[IUP24]

I always wanted to hear John Reily's thoughts on that night (Gannon coach).

It's a neat idea. It just backfired miserably. Wrong opponent. Biggest crowd in there ever and it was dead silent for the first 9-10 minutes of the game. I remember Joe saying it psyched his team out.

Schedule it against Clarion, not the (then) best defense in the league.

Amazingly, IUP was winning that game at halftime.

It's a good story.

Haven't read the board for a week or so and saw Silent Night came up again.

I laugh how this topic seems to come up every single year during a lull. It's amazing how that night still lives on. I was one of the individuals who came up with the idea, so anyone with questions or complaints can direct them to me. It was unique and a ton of fun. And it worked. Here's the actual story...

What many don't know is that we started that whole thing right around Thanksgiving during the fall semester as basketball season was beginning to heat up. Myself and a few buddies were working together to increase student attendance at basketball games. And although there were things we asked for help from some individuals within IUP for, most of what we did was simple grassroots marketing. We started the "Crimson Crazies" twitter account, which got passed down after we graduated in 2015, and that account is totally inactive (sadly) now.

One night at Twisted Jimmy's, we were enjoying a few adult beverages and wanted to come up with some gimmick that would get students actually excited to attend a D2 basketball game. So we thought of Taylor University's annual "Silent Night" tradition and thought, "wouldn't that be really cool?" So we picked a Saturday night game for the spring semester and sent out a tweet that night saying that we were going to host "Silent Night," have a costume contest, etc. We got everyone involved and when we left campus for that extended break we never stopped tweeting about it. It was total grassroots. Zero university involvement (at first). Just a couple guys with a love of college basketball who wanted to create a big time atmosphere for one night. Frats and sororities were all engaged. All of the major student run IUP social media accounts which weren't IUP affiliated were part of pushing it. It gained a ton of momentum over the winter break. Everybody was talking about what ridiculous costume they were going to wear for "Silent Night." The frats and sororities were arguing about who was going to be the best dressed for a game that was 2 months away.

When we got back to campus, we wanted to see what we could do to keep the buzz going. So we decided one day to start pushing the actual goal, which was to set the attendance record. So we created the hashtag #PackTheKCAC. We pushed that so hard and it somehow just took off. We encouraged people to just randomly finish tweets with #PackTheKCAC, and they actually did it. Somewhere along the line, you could actually feel a real energy on campus getting ready for a game a few weeks out. People (not us) started putting up fliers on campus. The daily email that got sent out to students started to talk about Silent Night and #PackTheKCAC every day.

Eventually, Giant Eagle Express reached out to us via twitter and asked about the event, and soon we were contacted by the athletic department and the university got involved with really promoting the game. Giant Eagle Express ended up purchasing 800 tickets for the game and passed them out to the community, for free, to help #PackTheKCAC. The Indiana Gazette even ran a story on it. The week of the game #PackTheKCAC was actually trending in the Pittsburgh area. It was mentioned on 93.7 The Fan in Pittsburgh. It had buzz as being "the biggest college basketball game in Western PA that weekend." We had Jim Colony and Josh Miller tweeting at us. We had twitter accounts like Eatn' Park (seriously) tweeting #PackTheKCAC.

Admittedly, I didn't know what to really expect the day of the game. But it blew away all of our expectations. The entire closed side of the KCAC was filled with students behind the basket. The primary student section across from the IUP bench was filled before halftime of the women's game. I believe a game last year broke the record from that night by about 100-200 people, but I'll do what everyone else does when talking about attendance on this message board... "That number was made up. It wasn't a butt's in seats number." I still believe we hold that record. To this day I've never seen that building filled like that.

I obviously wish IUP won the game. But I don't believe Silent Night had anything to do with the outcome. IUP led at halftime, took control early in the 2nd half, and then they just had no answer for Adam Blazek down the stretch. They came into a tough environment and won a game on the road - tip the cap... I think people too quickly jump to the final score without recognition of what truly went into that and how it became what it did. I watch these games on the stream now and students either don't show up or they are sitting on their hands. IUP could do well from having a couple students a few beers deep at a bar trying to come up with a promotional idea to generate some serious buzz for a basketball game. Silent Night got students who typically wouldn't have cared to show up to a basketball game; and maybe they had a good time and went again. That's ultimately what it's about and how you build a fanbase. The fact that it's still talked about here shows (and proves) that the end goal was successful. It's a great college memory. And it's something I am happy that I was part of.

[Ship69]

My question at this point is more regarding roster construction and not necessarily with roster management. I think there was a pretty clear understanding that this team was going to be different than the last four. I recognize that at this point there are injuries and other factors, but this team at this stage is just bad. Not sure how else to describe them. And it makes me ask this question... How did it get here?

To be clear, I think the critical domino that put this team in this position was the unexpected transfer of Tomiwa after last year. Even with this roster, they are probably way better with him on the team.

But I do question what Joe is evaluating, or what he thinks he's getting, with many of the guys he's bringing in. We talk about the "Joe Doghouse" and him not playing guys. Jaheim Bathea was hyped as perhaps the best high school PG he ever recruited. He played in like 4 games and Joe tossed him to Siberia. We have Dolan Waldo this year. Those are just two very, very recent examples. But it seems as though he's missing on a ton of high school recruits. He has a higher hit rate on some of the international guys he brings from the prep ranks (Cobo, Tomiwa, Marcel, etc.) and the multi-year D1 transfers (Jones, Morris, etc.). From a foundational perspective, it's going to be much, much harder to both get and keep the multi-year guys transferring down. You simply have to be able to identify high school talent who can play for your program. And I'm not saying that as though he's not gotten great high school players (Ethan Porterfield, Malik Miller, Armoni Foster, etc.). It does seem though that the quality of guy he is brining in seems to be dropping, and he seems to be giving up on those guys way earlier than before.

I guess my ultimate point here is that it seems that there are valid questions regarding multiple things:
1) How did this roster (at this program) have so little high end talent (with the understanding that this was going to be a "down" year)?
2) Why does it seem like so many of the highly hyped high school recruits of late seem to not live up to it?
3) Why do those guys seem to get benched so quickly and not provided game action to figure it out at the college level?

I'm not necessarily saying I am pinning everything on Joe (although I don't think he's done a great job this year). It is just pretty wild to me how bad this entire team is. That just doesn't happen overnight.

With the portal and the uncertainty about how HS prospects will turn out, I don't think it's ever been harder to maintain quality depth at a D2 program. If you're not in the top echelon and get a potentially star player, you immediately start to worry about who might poach him from you. If you're at a place like IUP or WL, you might lose a star to a low-level D1 program. If you're a run-of=the-mill PSAC team, you might lose out to a stronger PSAC team or another D2 conference.

The loss of Tomiwa obviously had a big impact on the IUP front line this season, and the loss of the guards to injury and academia has compounded that. There are a lot of PSAC teams who are a player or two away from being pretty good. I think Ship's prospects will improve when 6-8 transfer Donovan Hill hits the court, although I imagine it will take him a while to get integrated into the team. The Raiders still won't be world-beaters as a lot of the players have been inconsistent, but the addition of another big will mean better adjustments on defense and fewer guys playing out of position. They recently had 6-3 Denzel Figueroa guarding Edinboro's 7-footer at times.

Conversely, a lot of good or above-average PSAC teams are only an injury or two away from dropping to average or below. Although this was never a vintage IUP team, they were certainly above the league average with Dillard and Clarke in the lineup. Without those guys, they will struggle. I'm with you in wondering why Lombardi doesn't give some of these guys more minutes in his current situation, but I know far less about what goes on with him than you.