Summer is almost over because...

 ...the 2023 Western Athletic Conference Volleyball preseason poll was released yesterday as well as the preseason accolades. Those get released roughly a week before the season starts which means the summer doldrums are almost up. WAC and NCAA women's soccer has already started, but seeing as that is one of many teams UT Arlington does not have, volleyball is the Maverick bellwether for the end of summer.

The same disclaimer I put before every preseason poll is coming: the poll plus a dollar will get you four quarters. While volleyball doesn't have the same turnover that football, both genders of basketball and baseball do, there's still new faces, new coaches and in some cases new teams, though the WAC did not add any University this year. All that change gives a bit of uncertainty to the poll. It does set clear expectations for the season and this poll has the UTA squad right around my expectations.

But first the poll:

Basketball Schedule Detective, August 2023 Edition

 I almost put the following news into the comments of the schedule post from last month, but I'm excited about one of the two games I'm going to update for the upcoming UT Arlington men's basketball season, so its own post it gets.

Rocco Miller broke two games this week on his Twitter account. The first is most likely a guarantee game against the New Mexico Lobos on November 16 in Albuquerque. The teams have met four times prior, including three in New Mexico, losing all four.

But the big news is that the UTA Texas State series that I speculated to coming is now known and the series continues. It looks like the rumors I received that Texas State played their half of a home-and-home contract in Fort Worth last year aren't true as College Park Center will host the Bobcats this year and the Mavericks travel to San Marcos next. The game is schedule for November 25.

Summer Chats: Conference Realignment Thoughts

 I haven't addressed wide-scale NCAA conference realignment on The Maverick Rambler, with the exception of how the UT Arlington Athletics Department fits within that framework. I will break that today.

Conference realignment has always been a thing, even if it wasn't called that. Look at the constant shuffling of the Southland Conference from its founding until UTA left in the 2012. The Mavericks had 18 different SLC rivals, but never had more than 11 members at any one time. The pace has accelerated the last two decades, starting with the Atlantic Coast Conference's raid of the Big East. Ever since then there has been a constant rollercoaster of universities trying to better themselves.

Rivalries have been postponed and/or destroyed while teams with no geographic compatibility have replaced the more natural and/or heated ones. Teams are chasing the dollar to increase their competitiveness while negating the fan base. Baylor stopped playing TCU and SMU to replace with Kansas and Iowa State. Until of course TCU was admitted back, along with West Virginia. Guess which game tends to draw more fans, regardless of sport? Now obviously Kansas is a draw in basketball, but now so much in anything else. West Virginia had no natural rivals until Cincinatti was admitted this year. Iowa State's biggest games were out of conference.

But it didn't hit clown world until a year ago.

Basketball Schedule Detective, Addendum

 Wouldn't you know it, only a few hours after I posted about the known games for the upcoming basketball season, WAC Hoops Digest posted about the Western Athletic Conference's scheduling alliance with Conference USA, specifically the match-ups coming up on the women's side.

To recap, we know very little about the UT Arlington women's basketball schedule, but I expect a flip of venues of some of last year's opponents. Potential road games exist against Texas Southern, Texas A&M-Commerce and Arizona with potential home games against Lamar and Houston. Houston played at College Park Center in 2020/21, so that's likely a completed contract. Texas Southern played in Arlington in 2019 with no return game, so that's not set in stone either.

Unlike the men, the UTA women finished decently in the NET rankings as they played a difficult non-conference season well before injuries hurt the squad in conference play. Thanks to that, they get to participate and of the potential names to come to CPC, I'm pretty happy. 

Basketball Schedule Detective, Summer 2023 Edition

As usual per the summer, there's a slow trickle of information coming out, usually from outside sources, regarding the upcoming season's schedule. I'm not sure why and I have never followed up upon why, but the UT Arlington teams always seem late to the schedule-release party.

So with that, let's play schedule detective for the basketball teams and see what we know as of now. I'm not sure of any other place that tries to put the known releases all in one place.

First, the Western Athletic Conference has released their upcoming conference schedule and it is vastly different than what we've seen as of late. It is a full double-round robin schedule, with one home and one away game against each member of the conference. UTA hasn't had that since the 2015/16 Sun Belt Conference season, when they played 20 games against the ten other members of that conference. In fact, the first three years of the Belt was a double round robin, as well the lone year in the WAC in 2012/13. You'd have to go back to the 2002/03 season when UTA played a double-round robin in the Southland Conference.

Are the Feet Dragging

It has been three months since UT Arlington students voted in favor of football returning to campus by nearly 62 percent. Obviously, there's not going to be much movement in three months, but news has been scant to come out about the topic. 

I've spoken to a few people about the latest and unsurprisingly, the University is either taking a deliberate approach, or dragging its feet. I'm generally an optimist and want to believe the U is giving a good faith effort.

UTA President Jennifer Cowley was on record with the following quote:

Title IX requires that there be a sufficient number of women's sports seats, so the very first thing we need to do is to ask what it takes to expand our women's sports. So I've asked the Athletics director to evaluate some women's sports and come forward with recommendations around what we might do there.

What she is referencing is Title IX, the landmark legislation passed in the 1970's that dictate funding based on equality of both genders. Most people mistakenly believe Title IX requires a one for one scholarship for both women and men. It is actually a three-prong test where just one prong needs to be met.

Summer Chats: Men's Basketball Attendance

The summer is always the roughest part of the athletic sports season at the collegiate level. There's no active events, at least at UT Arlington, schedules for upcoming sports aren't released for a while and, specific to UTA, upcoming excitement for the arriving year is muted by the lack of fall sports on campus. With that said, I generally post the more random or non-calendar-specific items in June, July or August. I will now officially give it a title: Summer Chats.

Recently on Twitter, I and a couple other UTA fans engaged in a discussion about men's basketball attendance. It started off with WAC Hoops Digest showing a picture of a full College Park Center in its debut against the University of Texas-San Antonio. The text read that if new head coach K.T. Turner can pack the place, UTA would become one of the best home teams in the country. 

Of course, that point is entirely true. We have seen it before, both in big games and a couple of seasons that saw near 3,000 average fans in the seats. In addition to the high-talent teams, those crowds helped propel the team even further.