End of the 2008-2009 Season & Adopting MVC Teams

Well, the 2008-2009 regular season has officially come to a close with Drake's loss on Thursday night of the play-in round of the MVC tournament. At 17-15, with the poor stretch run that we saw, I think it's fair to say that the post-season is done as well. We have no shot at the NCAA, and I think about 50 teams would have to decline their NIT bids for us to get one. I don't even know if the CBI is going on again this year. So for them to be done is quite a disappointment. It was even more disappointing that they weren't even on TV. The MVC really needs to get that sorted out -- if they're going to be a "power mid-major" they can't be having rounds of their tournaments not televised, even if it is games from the bottom four of the conference.

The Mark Phelps era at Drake has taken quite the interesting turn. After a solid 9-3 start with wins over Iowa, ISU, and New Mexico, we limped to a 8-12 record in our final MVC (and bracket buster) games. Grading his performance takes into the following accord:

Pros:

• We won our third straight Big Four championship going 3-1 and winning two games on the road.
• We notched road victories against the two top teams in the Valley (Creighton and UNI).
• We secured five great incoming freshmen. From the looks of it, Ben Simons could be something special, as could Aaron Hawley, Van Deest, and possibly even Uhlenhopp.

Cons:

• We were downright awful in the MVC regular season.
• We were blown out in several games.
• The offense never really got on track and

Overall, I'd have to give Phelps a C+ in his first year. This was going to be a transition year no matter what, but I wish we could have had just a few more wins. Going 19-13 or 20-12 would have been so much more rewarding than 17-15. We got blown out way too many times.

But on the flip side, when you consider the SIU game and the Evansville games at home, if lady luck were on our side we could have easily just been 19-13 this year. It's amazing how just a few plays here and there can significantly change our season. Last year they all went our way. This year, it seems like karma swung back out of our favor.

The one other item I'd like to note is that I think I'll officially be adopting UNI as the team for the NCAA tournament, and most likely noting some items for the NIT tournament if possible. Check back for some of those matchups as I'll most likely try to highlight UNI's pod, wherever and whoever that entails.

Going forward, I'm probably going to post more in depth about UNI in the tournament, then the new recruiting class, and keys to next year. At some point, I'm probably going to officially hang it up for the year and wait until next October. We'll see how it goes. While I wish I could have held the frequency of posts throughout the year, I sure was pleased with the first year of BulldogsRoundball and am looking forward to continuing it again in upcoming years, ideally with even better and more frequent analysis. Maybe I'll even try to line up some guest writers as well for next year. Hollar at me if you have such interest. In the meantime, let's see how the rest of this field of 65 shakes out...

-dutl