Drake is 13-9 overall and 6-5 in the Missouri Valley Conference. The Bulldogs are ranked No. 97 in the RPI with a 66 strength of schedule and the Aggies are currently No. 90 with a SOS ranking of 117.
Drake has Top 50 RPI wins over Wichita State and Iowa State this season. Sophomore guard Rayvonte Rice leads the Bulldogs with 17.3 points per game with six rebounds per game and junior forward Ben Simons is scoring 16.2 points per game.
The Missouri Valley Conference is currently No. 8 in the RPI and the WAC is No. 12.
Drake will be the Aggies first game against a current MVC school since a 1996 game against Southern Illinois.
NMSU has a Top 50 win over No. 44 New Mexico.
Nothing sticks out from a team standpoint. Drake shoots 35.7 percent from 3-point range, score 70 ppg, shoots 46 percent from the floor while opponents are shooting 44 percent against them. They average 13 turnovers and 10 assists per game. They do average 7 steals per game.
6 comments:
Wow!
And it's a nationally televised game. It'll be awesome for the rest of the country (all 85 viewers) to have the opportunity to tune in to Menzies' brand of mediocrity.
Let's just hope the team comes in unscathed from the likes of Cal-State Bakersfield and Northern New Mexico College (a team that has won 2 games in its last 46--way to go schedulers!).
Like the thousands of no-longer-season-ticket-holders, I'll continue to hold my nose, look the other way, and hope and pray for the day when the athletic director retires and the coach discovers he has a conscience ("Man, I can't no longer rob the taxpayers of New Mexico of nearly four hundred-grand a year--I wonder if Coach Pitino needs me to come back as Pizza Orderer?").
If the powerful NMSU marketing machine can just figure out where the "on" button is, there might be 5,000 in attendance in the PAC.
Anon 9:44 loves the Aggies so much. Its ok man. Its gonna be ok. Take a deep breath.
Anon 11:38,
You got that right. I grew up with the Aggies.
But beyond the loyalty to my boyhood favorite team, is a sense of what's right, of what's just, of what's earned.
Menzies' salary isn't right, isn't just, and he never did anything to earn it. He arrived at NMSU with one (ONE!) year of head coaching experience. And, I think that was by default. If you'll notice he was head coach for Santa Monica CC in 1994-95, then the following year was back to assistant coach.
It's just difficult to see him taking all that money for having done so very little to earn it.
Compare Marvin's salary with that of his peers, and you will find he is somewhere in the bottom 50% of all D1 coaches. Yet the Aggies are consistently in the top 33% of D1 teams. I would wager that of the coaches whose teams are better than the Aggies this year, maybe 4 or 5 out of the 70 (by RPI) make less money than Menzies does. Anyone care to do a research project?
I'm excited to see this match-up. It's an old school Missouri Valley match-up that old time Aggie fans will love. We have 5 games before the Drake game. In terms of Aggie Basketball history, this match-up is long overdue. I'm looking forward to the 18th and the return trip next year.
GO AGGIES!!!!
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