You may have seen the meme.
You may remember that we, the NIT populace, had been excited about Akron.
You may have even kept tabs on last night’s game, since Joe told you to bet on it.
If this is the case, you understand the situation, but for the newbies, let’s spell it out:
- Akron’s the best team in the MAC, on paper.
- It looked, six weeks ago, like Akron was going to dominate the MAC.
- When Akron didn’t dominate the MAC, it still looked like they’d win its regular season title, and you know what, maybe the lack of domination would be better for their NIT hopes anyway.
- Akron’s 5’8” point guard, Loren Cristian Jackson, established dominion over the Rust Belt and our hearts.
- We liked the rest of Akron too.
- Last night, Akron played Bowling Green, an upstart Joe called the luckiest team in the country. Both teams entered with three losses. There were four games to go. Akron had comfortably won the first meeting. We felt good about Akron.
- Akron went out and missed fifty field goals.
It was a bad performance, even for an NIT contender, and to make matters worse, Akron managed to earn themselves three technical fouls. An utter meltdown. Jackson scored 35, but his teammates only scored 25, and he missed ten threes, to go with twenty three-point misses from his teammates (he did make three, and his teammates made two, so they got past the 10% threshold, which was looking unlikely for a while, but goodness, at what point do you stop shooting threes?).
Some (me, in a text) called it the most frustrating thing they had ever periodically checked in on while driving Uber and talking public transit with multiple passengers (big day for public transit talk). It was a debacle. And Akron, who had looked like a prime contender for an NIT automatic bid, is going to have to settle for competing for a bid to a distinctly less respectable tournament unless they can tie things up with Bowling Green and win the tiebreaker (I don’t know what the tiebreaker is, but if it’s what I think it is, it doesn’t look good for the Zips), or pass the Falcons altogether.
It’s not impossible that Akron ties this up. They’ve got to play Buffalo on the road Saturday, which is not easy, but after that they’re back at home, and while Ohio isn’t bad and Kent State’s decent, the former MAC favorites will be favored to at least win each game. Bowling Green, meanwhile, also has games with Kent State and Buffalo looming after a visit to Miami (the one in Ohio). It’s still possible Bowling Green isn’t actually good, but that might not stop them. They’ve certainly won a lot of close games, but so did I when playing with my imaginary friends as a kid, and I never felt the other shoe drop, so it’s possible these clowns won’t either.
In other words, Akron’s NIT hopes aren’t dead yet. But they did get hit by a train last night. That train’s name was Akron.
