• Season 9 SuperTicker presented by BLAPP
#TMM9
Having recently completed its 9th season, The Mid-Majority is a community chronicle of the smaller Division I college basketball conferences. Last year, the theme was Team. Six groups of five (plus a fantasy mid-major player) were engaged in friendly Amazing Race-style competition, criss-crossing Hoops Nation to provide awesome college basketball content. Season X (2013-14) will be our final one.

Recent Game Recaps

Epilogue, The Ninth: Only Love Can Break Your Heart

Memories

So We Meet Again

Rte. 139 - End of the Line

Hanging On

A Championship in Pictures

This Time of Year

Dotson Leads Ducks to the Sweet Sixteen

Grizzlies Overwhelmed by Orangemen

Empire

Challenge 11: Final Four Memories

By George, UConn is Dead

Butler and Us

Donning the Black and Gold

Challenge 10: Tourney Memories

The Madness of the Horizon League

The Rare Ivy League Conference Tournament

MAC Madness

Anything Can Happen in the MAAC

Challenge 9: Shock The Neighborhood

A Youthful Surprise

From Worst to First

Peers and Seers

Tag: Essays
Sorted by date
S7 November 5, 2010 Passion is all about being vibrant and eager to put forth the effort. Are you hungry to compete and excel, and enthusiastic about the opportunity to do so? Will you be passionate when you don't feel like it? On November 25, 2008, two days before Thanksgiving, Davidson College hosted Loyola of Mar...
S7 November 3, 2010 The late Thomas Rubick, my dear friend, professor and sensei, had a unified theory of communication technology. When a utility matures, he said, once a superior thing surpasses its functional usefulness as a tool, the old tool is more free to act as a conduit for art. He first told me of this idea b...
S7 November 2, 2010 A common question people ask: why don't I fill this site with team and conference previews in early November? Shouldn't I use my extensive knowledge of mid-major college basketball for the common good? The easy answer: all that stuff can be found elsewhere. I did a 1,400-word flyover for this month'...
S7 November 1, 2010 "It is not surprising that after a long period of searching and erring, some of the concepts and ideas in human thinking should have come gradually closer to the fundamental laws of this world, that some of our thinking should reveal the true structure of atoms and the true movements of stars." - V...
S6 December 29, 2009 PAWTUCKET, R.I. -- One more drinker's holiday, and the calendar will flip. Many Americans are spending this week in silent fear of what's on the other side: a return to the bleak routine of five-day workweeks, the gray skies of short days, and January bills from December's illusions of prosperity. O...
S5 November 10, 2008 (Originally posted November 13, 2004) It is designed to do a lot of things, but it certainly is not designed to break your heart. The game begins in the late autumn, when everything else has shriveled and fallen and died. Its blossoms come slowly in winter's course like crocus starts popping throug...
S5 November 9, 2008 Ninth in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season. I have no Wikipedia entry of my own, not even a stub. If I understand the process correctly, you have to be either rich or a character on The Simpsons to get one of those. Being neither, and therefore not su...
S5 November 8, 2008 Eighth in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season.Since the invention of the printing press and discovery of binding, it's been the dream of everyone who strings words together to write a book. A longform work of 80 or 100 thousand words that can be touched,...
S5 November 7, 2008 Seventh in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season. For a nation that takes its freedom so seriously, we sure are confused about it. Our society is rigidly segmented and specialized, everyone must find their place. From parental career projections to colleg...
S5 November 6, 2008 Sixth in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season. Here in early November, we're still at least a month away from the non-stop barrage of "Year In Review" specials, all those tidy bow-snapping recaps that attempt to impose order on a loosely-joined, selectiv...
S5 November 5, 2008 Fifth in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season. In case you haven't heard, our great nation recently concluded a long and protracted and polarizing popularity contest that decided, among other things, our heads of state and guiding ideologies for the fore...
S5 November 4, 2008 Fourth in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season. If you're just now dropping by and don't know what this is all about, this site is all about going to mid-major college basketball games. A lot of them. I attended 117 total games last year, and I've been to...
S5 November 3, 2008 Third in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season. New technology always takes time to find its proper place, to soak into the mainstream. Over three centuries passed before the printing press changed from a luxury item for the powerful into a tool of the pe...
S5 November 2, 2008 Second in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season. This being the first Sunday of The Mid-Majority's Season 5 (and a Daylight Savings-adjusted morning upon which thousands of churchgoers will miss their services), it's as good a time as any for a Bible story...
S5 November 1, 2008 First in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season. It's not supposed to work out for the best, and the system is designed to anticipate failure. On March 21 in Birmingham, the four lower seeds wore their extra digits like anchors, eliminated one after another...
S4 November 9, 2007 Once upon a time there was a tiny little cell, one among a million billion, sloshing and sliding inside a gigantic and vibrant and heaving body. The tiny little cell did its tiny little job as well as it tiny little could, and during its time off it had fun bouncing around with other tiny little lik...
S4 November 8, 2007 It was an easygoing, unassuming late-summer Saturday in Rhode Island. I had completed my weekend house-husband chores (saving the stinky litter boxes for last, as usual), then prepared for a long, languid afternoon of relaxation on the patio. I contemplated the birdfeeder, turning out a few chamber-...
S4 November 7, 2007 Before throwing the switch, he gathered his thoughts in the virtual darkness, choosing his words carefully. He didn't know who was out there on the other side -- who his audience would be, whether or not he would be able to find one. If an audience for someone like him even existed. This was somethi...
S4 November 6, 2007 Here's another story we won't have time for later. When I was 12, I went through a phase that most failed child prodigies go through, the fitful burst of youthful creativity and frustration that comes right before the realization that girls are interesting. For me, it manifested itself in a short-li...
S4 November 5, 2007 In 1995, five years into my stay out in Oregon, I became homesick for the opposite coast, the one I grew up on. The feeling started as confusion and frustration, which grew into a acute sense of not belonging, culminating in a crystalline realization. I missed hockey. My New York Rangers had won th...
S4 November 4, 2007 The New Hampshire boarding school I attended is located on a remote hilltop, in a broadcast television dead-spot and a half-hour's walk from the nearest cash register. Back in the 1980's, before WiFi brought the world together, our only contact points with the real world were the radio and the Bosto...
S4 November 3, 2007 Mid-major universities tend to fall in one of three categories. There are the expensive and tiny religious schools in remote and leafy locations, flame-keepers of Christian subsects born out of the Great Schisms. You have your specialized colleges: the teacher's schools, the agriculture and mining i...
S4 November 2, 2007 There's an annual event -- if that's a phrase suitable and grey enough to describe something that doesn't cut it as a tradition -- here in our household. Every year around this time, the satellite television company beams in a solid week of unlimited American professional basketball in a free previe...
S4 November 1, 2007 First, this. In mid-August, I was inside a cube-shaped Pilot Travel Center alongside an otherwise barren and remote stretch of northern Pennsylvania. That's where I met someone who might be the tallest truck stop employee in America. He must have been about 6-foot-8, at the very least. The mop he p...
S3 February 7, 2007 LOS ANGELES -- This one's for the old-timers, the folks who have been following the journey from its humble beginnings two and a half years ago. You know who you are. There's a secret I've been keeping from you (shhhh...), or rather it's part of the story that didn't fit well inside the 30-second c...
S3 January 1, 2007 PAWTUCKET, R.I. -- I'm not a complainer by nature, not at all. I don't gripe about primetime television becoming a lowest-common denominator toilet, or that Kenny G did a lite-jazz cover of James Blunt's "You're Beautiful," unknowingly creating the audio skeleton-key to hell's gates in the process. ...
S3 December 19, 2006 There's a debate raging in Hoops Nation, one that has very little relevance whatsoever to anything relevant. It's supposed to be about respect, honor and parity. It should be about ball control, free throws and the flex offense. And sure, it's about basketball -- a little bit -- but it's also about ...
S3 November 2, 2006 One thing you can never say about our game is that it overstays its welcome. For all but the lucky pocket of players and fans whose season didn't end in a meaningful loss, college basketball is quickly forgotten, gone, off the radar. For some, it's the pull of the new baseball season, but for most...
S2 April 9, 2006 INDIANAPOLIS, Apr. 2 -- There are huge signs all over town -- on airport walls, strung over streetlights, over the main gate to the RCA Dome. They all read, "The Road Ends Here." There's also a giant logo on the side of the 45,000-seat venue, a green and gold star with zag-zigging trailers that has...
S2 December 12, 2005 This is the 9th in a series of 10 early-season essays. "A dream is a wish your heart makes," it's said, "when you're fast asleep." That's nice and everything, but why does Disney have the market cornered on all that dewy fantasyland crap? This date - 12-12-2005 - marks a key development in the his...
S2 November 30, 2005 This is 8 in a series of 10 early-season essays.Yeah, you, buster. You're as guilty as the next one. There's nobody around, it's okay to admit it - it's happened to you too. Here's the scene: you're sitting at the sports bar, watching the sports ticker out of the corner. There it is - a score that...
S2 November 18, 2005 This is 7 in a series of 10 early-season essays.Karl Marx was a smart guy, he had some revolutionary ideas about class struggle and stuff. But even though the East German city named in his honor would field a dominant women's team named the Karl-Marx Stadt Chem Cats, the father of modern communism d...
S2 November 17, 2005 This is 6 in a series of 10 early-season essays.There are 4,484 young men currently playing Division I college basketball for 334 schools. These players come of all shapes, sizes and ability levels. Some are thin, some are fat, some think they'll wear a draft-night hat. Some are far and some are nea...
S2 November 14, 2005 This is 5 in a series of 10 early-season essays.It was a dark and stormy night. The villain, sweater-vested and scowling, paced the floor. Boo! Hiss! the audience cried. But just then, the mood was leavened by a comic-relief appearance of the drunk clown, teetering and leering at girls half his age ...
S2 November 4, 2005 This is 3 in a series of 10 early-season essays.In 1891, as James Naismith considered the equation of ball and hoop, a French physicist named Henri Poincaré was contemplating a similar issue involving roundish objects. Kepler's laws of planetary motion had only dealt with the orbit of one pla...
S2 November 3, 2005 This is 2 in a series of 10 early-season essays.I think we can all agree that progress is a good thing: forward is preferable to back, and up is a hell of a lot better than down. Progress is all about development, advancement, evolution. If you examine our history as a planet, you'll notice that a...
S2 November 1, 2005 This is 1 in a series of 10 early-season essays.The ball makes no secret of itself; to grasp full control requires both hands. The primary instrument of our game announces its presence loudly - to maneuver the ball across the playfield is to print it repeatedly against the wood court with typewriter...
S1 March 29, 2005 Epilogue With the notable exception of our friends in the Ivy League, very few choose to be mid-major people. It usually starts with a stumble: a spate of bad grades during a streak of teenage rebellion, or a bad night of sleep before SAT Saturday (for whatever reason). All of a sudden, there's a ...
S1 December 7, 2004 The U.S. Postal Service recommends that folks get their holiday mailing done early, because an estimated 20 billion pieces of mail will be sent through the pipes during these next few weeks. That's a lot of mail. So just because there are 16 whole shopping days left until Christmas doesn't mean you ...
S1 November 18, 2004 When your humble proprietor was a wee lad, he played him some base ball. Although official statistics were not recorded in the Keene-Peterborough (N.H.) Pee Wee League, I'm sure that my .560 season batting average (achieved primarily with slap singles) would have been near the top of the league lead...
S1 November 15, 2004 I can remember a time when close only counted in horseshoes and hand grenades. When second place meant "#1 loser," when gold was for champions and silver was for dinnerware, when "Miss Congeniality" and "bridesmaid" really meant "No Soup For You." There, in the dimmest recesses of my memory, I remem...
S1 November 13, 2004 It is designed to do a lot of things, but it certainly is not designed to break your heart. The game begins in the late autumn, when everything else has shriveled and fallen and died. Its blossoms come slowly in winter's course like crocus starts popping through icefields. And when it does stop, it ...
S1 November 11, 2004 To the baseball fan, a long winter of hot stove leagues and hibernation is rendered tolerable by that most optimistic of sporting phrases, those two words that warm the soul like sunshine on the coldest of January mornings: "Opening Day." The football fan can summon the bracing chill of September w...
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