Thursday, January 27, 2011

It's a Bird! It's a Donkey! No, It's a MAC Official!

Another incredibly disappointing televised loss for the men's basketball team yesterday. I'll just cut to the chase. The final score was 83-74. Northern Illinois shot 44.4% while the Zips shot 41.8%. But the Zips connected on 5 more three-pointers than the Huskies, while winning that percentage battle by 8.4%. So why was the score this bad with stats like that, you ask?

It could have been due to the Huskies outrebounding the Zips 43-34.

It wasn't.

It may have been because of the following statistics:

Akron was 6-12 in free throw shooting for the game. NIU's Xavier Silas was 16-20. NIU as a team shot 29-40.

Read that again. Yep. Silas had 8 more free throws than the entire Zips team. The rest of the Huskies had an additional 20.

The announcers immediately chalked it up to the lack of aggressive play from Akron. I agree...that some of it was due to a lot of jump shooting from the Zips.

Folks, it may look bad on paper; it looked a lot worse on television. At the end of the game, five Akron players had 4 fouls, including Alex Abreu, who totaled 14 minutes on the court.

Whatever the issue, the Zips are now 2-4 in the MAC and need to get themselves going. Bad officiating happens (*cough cough* every game in the MAC *cough*). It's part of the game. The Zips need to play better than the refs if they want to make it to the tournament this year.

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