Amidst the vomiting and hours upon hours of blissful slumber, I missed the MAC basketball roundtable questions going out earlier this week and wasn't able to disseminate them to our team. So I'm just going to back these out quickly so the good fellow at FalconBlog can have his long-awaited questions answered.
Who's doing a better job coaching this year? Reggie Witherspoon or Rob Murphy?
Murphy by a mile. He saw the kernels of talent left over by the Charles Ramsey dynasty and saw little shooting ability but some big size and hustle throughout. So he made them keep the opponent to under 25 per half and it won't always work against Kent State and Michigan State, but for now it's keeping them in the hunt for a neat, neat seed.
Witherspoon is staying afloat in the MAC East with the talents he recruited, and not finishing fifth or sixth is going to be an accomplishment in that division. I give this to Murphy.
How are you feeling about the bracket buster? Both this year's matchup(s) and in general.
Honestly it's starting to become a bit of a chore. Just trying to keep track of 12 games on one day ... it's always tough to balance it. And yet each one is a little fascinating because it's a quirky little pop quiz in the middle of the year. They're like bowls. They don't accomplish the spirit of the intent, which was to give bubble teams a quality win to improve at-large hopes. But many of these teams are just trying to win their conference — so it'll potentially help one team improve a seed, whichever one wins the MAC, or potentially hurt it.
Generally speaking it's a mixed bag this year. Buffalo-South Dakota State could be a fun under-the-radar one (even though it's televised) but I even want to peek into ones like NIU-SIU Edwardsville, because who isn't at least a little curious how much of a 40fest that could be?
Based on this, the four lowest ranked teams in the MAC are also the four most inexperienced. Does this surprise you?
Things aren't supposed to make sense in the MAC like that. I don't like expectations. And while they're each a bit different in why they're inexperienced, I suppose that makes it okay. I don't think anybody expected for Miami, par example, to be where they were based on suspensions and injury, not to mention the Julian Mavunga cloning device shorting out the week before the season started.
It seems like I do less head shaking at the MAC's officiating than I used to. Is it better...or are we just used to it?
Truthfully I don't really pay much attention to the rating level of a league's officials. Everyone makes the jokes. MAC refs. Big Ten refs. Big East refs. Pac-12 refs. Those darn refs! It could definitely be the final stages of Stockholm Syndrome but in a game where so many calls have to be spur-of-the-moment judgment calls, a lot of them are going to suck and a few may even change the outcome of a game. But nothing major, deadball-wise, has been completely uncalled for, at least what I've seen. That and the ability to replay has certainly mitigated any other potential disasters.