Even though I laughed at his BS quote, I commend Byington for speaking to the local media to explain the scheduling situation.

Still no peep out of Spiker, Zillmer, the local media, or ANYBODY at Drexel regarding why Drexel got screwed so badly in the scheduling. The CAA should not be allowing a team to go into the tournament with 2 home games, 7 road games, 0 games cancelled by Drexel, 10 games cancelled by their opponents, and then be put into a position to have to play a first round play in game. I keep my fingers crossed that the league will step in here and "correct" the standings with ghost forfeits, but I shouldn't get my hopes up. Giving the teams that cancelled games ghost forfeits would be the right thing to do, but I'm not sure if the CAA is capable of doing the right thing.

For my definition of a ghost forfeit, I mean that these forfeits would only count for seeding purposes, and would not be actual wins or losses in the standings.

i got an email about a "caa preview zoom" 3/2 at 5 PM. i'm sure you got the same email. you should sign up and be your own reporter. it asked if you had questions for coach spiker. nobody else in the media cares enough to ask these questions.

i can't imagine they will factor in "ghost forfeits". is this something other conferences are doing? i agree with your premise. i just don't see it happening. the caa seems to be completely hands off in this process and seems happy just to see any basketball being played. maybe this was the attitude coming in which i actually agree with assuming we can trust everyone to do the right thing.

problem is you can't really trust anyone to do the right thing these days. people are selling hershey bears tickets for at least 3-4 times face value. one big time idiot was selling them for $2,000. this is what we have to look forward to as fans are allowed back into games on a limited basis.

I must have missed that meeting invite, as it was probably on a Drexel Ticket Office e-mail that I deleted. I have an appointment at that time, so I won't be able to make it. I think that the department knows that I'm not too happy with the situation based on some comments that I made on Facebook.

And it's insane regarding what you wrote about the Hershey Bears. Based on the current situation of limited ticket offerings for sporting events, somebody needs to step up and ban re-sales of tickets for a profit. If a very limited number of season ticket holders are permitted into an event, those STH's should be the sole users of the tickets or they should be forfeited. But of course as you said, nobody does the right thing anymore.

Only "ghost forfeits" that will happen are for teams that dont meet the 8 game minimum requirement where the missed games will count as losses for seeding purposes only. I dont agree with giving teams that got hit with pauses forfeits. We all knew it would be a weird season. Does it suck to always be on the short side of the stick? Sure. But to me its not worth fussing over too much. It is not something that can be controlled.

The only thing the league could have and probably should have done is stepped in mid way through conference play, when teams were making it clear games werent being made up whenever possible, to force their hand by making them show real effort in getting games made up or threaten them with forfeitures, real ones. I think they could have done that, without overstepping, because they would have given schools a chance to do right and when they didnt, they stepped in to help. Instead they stayed out and let it paly out, which is the correct move politically, if trying to not ruffle any schools feathers.

(02-25-2021 09:05 AM)jmu98 Wrote:  

(02-25-2021 08:48 AM)hiroshimacarp Wrote:  do we know for sure why we ended up going down there twice? maybe spiker wants to practice the trip for the tournament. just trying to give benefit of doubt.

Because the games were always scheduled to be at JMU. As for why we didn't just play both games the first time I have no idea. Why would we give up a home game to travel? We had already were the only team to give up a home game when we travelled to Elon to ensure a make up. We certainly weren't going to do it twice.

To give the same answer as jmu98, just worded a little differently: Because JMU values entitlement/selfishness over fairness.

To answer jmu98's question, because it is the right thing to do from an equity standpoint. So far JMU has played 5 at home and 4 on the road, Drexel has played 2 at home 6 on the road. At this point, JMU doesn't have anything to lose seeding-wise.

That being said, like JB I commend Byington for addressing it in the press even if he is not entirely telling the truth. At least they made an attempt to make up games unlike Charleston, Northeastern, and Delaware.

Lol @ JMU being responsible for rectifying Drexel’s crappy situation.

(02-25-2021 10:14 AM)dan10 Wrote:  Only "ghost forfeits" that will happen are for teams that dont meet the 8 game minimum requirement where the missed games will count as losses for seeding purposes only. I dont agree with giving teams that got hit with pauses forfeits. We all knew it would be a weird season. Does it suck to always be on the short side of the stick? Sure. But to me its not worth fussing over too much. It is not something that can be controlled.

The only thing the league could have and probably should have done is stepped in mid way through conference play, when teams were making it clear games werent being made up whenever possible, to force their hand by making them show real effort in getting games made up or threaten them with forfeitures, real ones. I think they could have done that, without overstepping, because they would have given schools a chance to do right and when they didnt, they stepped in to help. Instead they stayed out and let it paly out, which is the correct move politically, if trying to not ruffle any schools feathers.

I agree with the first paragraph. At this point, we just need to go out and win the tournament. Having to play four games wouldn't be ideal, but we can also avoid that by winning tomorrow. Nobody is that good in the CAA this year where the match-ups matter that much.

The time for the league to do something though was from the outset. They could have had in place a contingency plan for what would happen when games were postponed. The commissioner said on an early conference call that teams might play each other four times; as far as I know the only extra game has been the single game Drexel played at William and Mary. There never should have been a scenario where teams like Northeastern and Charleston are out scheduling OOC games (and seemingly picking up COVID-19 in the process) rather than making up games with CAA opponents who were available.

(02-25-2021 10:42 AM)HyperDuke Wrote:  Lol @ JMU being responsible for rectifying Drexel’s crappy situation.

It may not have come across that way, but I wouldn't expect JMU to take responsibility. That Drexel is going to JMU twice is on Spiker or Zillmer or whoever agreed to doing it. If the headline was right, Byington would have insisted on playing two that first weekend and then returning two games if other games weren't available this weekend. But as I reread the article, the headline is really Shane Mettlen putting words in Byington's mouth (at least based on the article quotes). All he says is that they were the most aggressive in rescheduling which does seem to be the case. At the end, he admits that in these last two weeks they didn't want to travel. It is refreshing to see a coach be honest and open with the press (and I suppose not surprising to see a reporter twisting the truth with his headline). He seems to be able to coach too; perhaps it is hard to really judge with a season like this but it seems like a good hire for JMU.

Yep. Joe D’Antonio did a terrible job with this. No reason that for example CofC shouldn’t have played the NC teams multiple times. You guys should have played Delaware and Towson. I would have done divisional play all season. Put CofC, UNCW, Elon, JMU, W&M in one division; Towson, Drexel, Hofstra, NU, Delaware in the other. You could have done two home and homes with each for 16 games, play one non-divisional opponent for 2 games.

If I were Joe, I would have started conference play in December. Even if it was two games for each team. That could have alleviated a lot of issues. The CAA also sticking with the 14-day pause (which every league had in November and December) while other leagues moved to 10 or even 7 day pauses hurt a lot as well.

He has just done a terrible job with this. Forget about not putting any games on national TV.

(02-25-2021 10:38 AM)Water Boy Wrote:  

(02-25-2021 09:05 AM)jmu98 Wrote:  

(02-25-2021 08:48 AM)hiroshimacarp Wrote:  do we know for sure why we ended up going down there twice? maybe spiker wants to practice the trip for the tournament. just trying to give benefit of doubt.

Because the games were always scheduled to be at JMU. As for why we didn't just play both games the first time I have no idea. Why would we give up a home game to travel? We had already were the only team to give up a home game when we travelled to Elon to ensure a make up. We certainly weren't going to do it twice.

To give the same answer as jmu98, just worded a little differently: Because JMU values entitlement/selfishness over fairness.

To answer jmu98's question, because it is the right thing to do from an equity standpoint. So far JMU has played 5 at home and 4 on the road, Drexel has played 2 at home 6 on the road. At this point, JMU doesn't have anything to lose seeding-wise.

That being said, like JB I commend Byington for addressing it in the press even if he is not entirely telling the truth. At least they made an attempt to make up games unlike Charleston, Northeastern, and Delaware.

Dude, JMU already gave up a home game and travelled to Elon earlier this season for a make up game that was due to Elon. We made up 5 games which I think is more than anyone else in the league. We had other make up games scheduled that were then cancelled due to further pauses at other programs. I am not sure what you want us to do.

i'm not going to judge who should have gone to play who. jmu wasn't obligated to come to philly if the games were originally at jmu.

there have been so many postponements i feel like you would need some sort of spread sheet to break things down. that would have been the league's job.

how about the ncaa in all of this? mostly just throwing this out there to get a chuckle out of people. their institutional oversight is selective. if i hadn't already given up on them...allowing football teams to self impose bowl bans this season was a complete joke. and i'm an lsu fan.

Of course its selective oversight. That is not new with the NCAA, in either football or basketball. They need revenue. That is all this season is about. Getting to the tournament and having a tournament to make money, regardless who is participating.

I mean look at how many teams have taken bans in basketball or football just before getting penalized, but after getting caught. Then the NCAA saying, "Yep, you punished yourself, you are good to go!" Happens all of the time. Teams choose to "miss" a tournament or bowl, when chances werent good they were making a good one anyhow or would miss the tournament outright. It is not a secret. Corruption breeds more corruption. It is why the NCAA HAS to seriously look at paying players because the writing was on the wall that the NCAA wouldnt exist when everyone broke away. Its all self-serving.

yeah i feel like more and more i'm hearing about schools giving themselves self imposed sanctions.

what's the ncaa for then?

i think i really gave up on the ncaa when unc was exposed about having a major that essentially didn't exist and most of the athletes were in it. that was back when i still lived in north carolina. the raleigh newspaper broke it. their athletic department should have been shut down.

The NCAA is there merely to profit off of the schools. They are the "glue" that gives the schools a unified platform to perform on. Otherwise some other agency would be created/formed so that schools could align and play and have meaningful championships. It is really just an oversight board that collects huge profits to be a part of.