Vol. 61 NO. 64
Tournament Time
Scouting Ohio: Current Record: 25-7 (12-5 Mid-American Conference)
Predictions:
Two Bobcats to Watch: G-D.J. Cooper: The junior has been a Bull killer this season and for much of his career. He’s averaging 17.5 points, and 6.5 assists in the two contests with Buffalo this season. Cooper is someone who loves to get in the lane and mix it up (despite his 5-foot-11 size) but he can also pull the trigger from deep. He only shoots 29 percent from behind the arc, but has taken more 3-point shots than anyone on the Ohio roster. G-Walter Offutt: Offutt is the only other player on the Ohio roster to start all 31 of its games. He’s also the only other player averaging double figures for the Bobcats with 12.1 points per game. The Ohio State transfer has provided the 1-2 backcourt punch that the Bobcats have used all season long to play an up-tempo style. His 23 points in the last meeting were a big part of the win in Buffalo. The Bulls will win if… They own the glass. Ohio got a staggering 20 more shot attempts than the Bulls in the February meeting. Buffalo is fourth in the nation in rebounding, and its games against Ohio have been the only aberration to the outstanding season on the boards. Winning the rebounding battle will be the only way to offset what the Ohio backcourt brings to the game. The Bobcats will win if… They win the turnover battle. Ohio is plus 14 in turnovers in the prior two meetings between the teams. Buffalo’s sophomore point guard Jarod Oldham is in his first year at the helm of the Bulls’ offense. Although he has shown flashes of brilliance this season, the Bobcats forced him to make enough mistakes to control the Bulls.
Buffalo looks to best Bobcats in semifinal
TYLER CADY
All-Time Record: 23-8 Ohio Last Meeting: 88-77 Ohio (Feb. 22, Alumni Arena)
ubspectrum.com
Friday, March 9, 2012
Senior Sports Editor Although Ohio head coach John Groce seems to have the Bulls number, this is a different Buffalo team. Last time these two teams met Buffalo was coming off an exhausting trip to South Dakota State. This time the tables are turned, Ohio played Thursday and are coming in on short rest. Buffalo has the talent, determination, and swagger to win the MAC, and Ohio is one of the last two teams in its way. Senior forward Mitchell Watt is playing the best basketball of his career and I expect it to carry over to Cleveland.
MARK DAVIS
Staff Writer Joseph T. Walsh was supposed to be introduced Wednesday as a candidate for the next provost of UB. But Walsh, the vice president for research and professor of biomedical engineering at Northwestern University, is no longer a candidate for the position. It is unclear whether Walsh was removed as a finalist candidate by the UB provost search committee or if he voluntarily withdrew his name.
Buffalo-76 Ohio-73 BRYAN FEILER
Connie Holoman, a deputy in the Office of the President, said the only people officially authorized to speak about the search for the next provost are search committee chairpersons Anne Curtis and David Felder, who were unavailable for comment. Attempts to reach Walsh at Northwestern offices in Chicago were unsuccessful.
Sports Editor Buffalo was swept by Ohio, including a rare home loss for Buffalo. But, that was after a long trip to South Dakota State. This one will come down to the wire and I think the team with the ball at the end of the game will have a chance to win it. The Bulls are 5-1 in the MAC in games decided by four points or fewer, so let’s hope they can continue that trend.
UB will take on Ohio on Friday in its’ first game of the MAC Tournament.
Buffalo-75
TYLER CADY Senior Sports Editor
Ohio-74 NATHANIEL SMITH
Sports Editor Fact: Ohio has beaten Buffalo twice. Fact: Its guards have killed Buffalo in both games, and Cooper is a gamer. But the Bulls want Ohio. This is a team that has prevented them from proving that they’re the best in the MAC. Throw the X’s and O’s out of the window; this game will be won on sheer determination and will. The Bulls have that will. Ohio better watch out. Buffalo-80
Northwestern Professor Dropped as Provost Candidate
One hundred nineteen days, 28 games, and it all comes down to this: the Mid-American Conference Tournament. The men’s basketball team sits just two wins away from its first ever NCAA Tournament appearance, but to get there it will have to get through the team that’s given it the most difficulty this season. There’s only one team in the MAC that Buffalo (19-9, 12-4 MAC) has yet to beat this season, Ohio (25-7, 12-5 MAC). Luckily (or not, depending on how you look at it) the Bulls have one more chance to accomplish the task, and this time it means more.
Alexa Strudler /// The Spectrum
The Bobcats get the chance to beat the Bulls for the third time this season because of a convincing 65-57 victory on Thursday night at Quicken Loans Arena over Toledo (18-16, 7-10 MAC). Ohio dominated on the boards grabbing 38 total (15 offensive) and forced the Rockets to turn the ball over a whopping 16 times. Ohio head coach John Groce said after the game that the Bobcats’ “calling card” is the way the squad has consistently forced teams to shoot low percentages from the field. Groce believes there will be four things his team must do to beat Buffalo: make adjustments, be able to adapt, be able to impose its will, and finally and simply, players must make plays.
Ohio-78
UB spokesman John Della Contrada said on Wednesday that he was unaware of the recent developments and could not speak to Walsh’s removal as a candidate. On Tuesday, the only remaining internal contender, Arjang Assad, met with members of the press and UB community to outline his vision as the potential provost. Assad is the current dean of UB’s School of Management and was a professor at the University of Michigan for 34 years before arriving at UB. The search for the next provost has progressed significantly since the fall semester. In September, UB officials announced they would establish a committee for the search, headed by Curtis and Felder. By February, the have been off-site interviews of at least 14 candidates. Beginning last Friday, March 2, The Center for Tomor-
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Acheson Annex Experiences Frequent Burglaries
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Buffalo’s Own moe. Shows No Signs of Aging
“The unfortunate part is, and we totally see this, it’s a temporary building and it would just cost probably some insane amount of money to change all of these doors,” Maranto said. “And I don’t know if this building is slated to actually sit up or be here this long, and it really truly would, at the end of the day, become – in my opinion – a huge misuse of university funds.”
photo illustration by Meg Kinsley Two office burglaries have occurred through the ceiling of the Acheson Annex.
LISA KHOURY Asst. News Editor When Curt Maranto’s South Campus office in the Acheson Annex was broken into on Monday, he didn’t think of it as anything out of the ordinary. The unidentified burglar entered the office through the ceiling. And it wasn’t the first time an incident like this occurred. The Acheson Annex was built as a temporary building in 1965. It was not meant to stand for long, according to Lieutenant Joshua Sticht of the University Police, but it is still being used. The construction of the temporary building has allowed continuous break-ins to occur, according to Maranto, the director of advancement at the Buffalo Prep office in the Acheson Annex. He and his colleagues have had multiple belongings stolen. “We’ve been chronically broken into,” Maranto said. “They’ve taken our cameras, our computer screens, petty cash, bus tokens. Anything that wasn’t nailed down – of any type of value – they take. If it wasn’t pushing in doors, it was crawling over the cinderblock walls through the ceiling tiles.”
struction company put walls inside that were meant to be temporary rather than permanent, according to Sticht. But the building has been “temporary” for 47 years. Cinderblock walls go all the way up in permanent buildings, so when a ceiling tile is pushed up, one can only find a wall there. Meanwhile, in Acheson Annex, there’s a wooden dry wall that only goes up to the ceiling tiles, which leaves completely open space up above. Once the burglar got through the ceiling tile, it was only a matter of getting his or her body up above, crawling across, and coming out on the other side into Maranto’s office. Maranto said the annex has been broken into four times in the 18 months he has been a staff member at UB. The wooden doors are also easy to break into. Only the door to the main office has been replaced with a metal door, but the rest of the offices still have doors that are easy to penetrate despite their locks. Although nothing was stolen from Maranto in the recent break-in via ceiling, he has had his computer, two still-cameras, one video camera, and all of his office supplies stolen since he’s been at UB.
Once the annex was put up, a con-
Buffalo Prep Program Director Crystal Austin’s office was broken into via the ceiling on Oct. 22. Her microwave and refrigerator, totaling $200 in value, were stolen. UPD officers are still investigating both break-ins, and a UPD detective believes the burglaries may have been by the same person, according to Sticht. The Acheson Annex and the Diefendorf Annex are the only two remaining temporary buildings on the UB campus. There is no current plan to rebuild or replace either of them in the near future; there are only long-term plans, according to Kevin Thompson, the director of the Facilities Planning and Design Department. Buffalo Prep staff attempted to install wireless security cameras, but they wouldn’t work because of UB’s wireless security, which frequently rotates its address to keep people from hacking into the system, according to Maranto. Sticht said UB has not installed a security system in the annex because the building is temporary. Maranto also said they could not use the security cameras that the rest of the UB campus has because those cameras are hooked up to hard drives, and the hard drives in the Acheson Annex are always at a risk of being stolen. Maranto does not feel unsafe in his office in the annex; he is just careful with what he leaves in his office. But even what he locks in his drawers gets stolen. “They literally pried open my desk to get [my cameras],” Maranto said. “Like when the first camera was taken, I started locking everything up in my desk under lock and
Friday: Few Snow Showers/Wind- H: 36, L: 24 Saturday: Partly Cloudy- H: 38, L: 36 Sunday: Partly Cloudy- H: 53, L: 46
ddd
LUKE HAMMILL Senior News Editor While they had by no means witnessed a bad performance, some fans were using words like “old” and “boring” as they walked out of moe.’s last Buffalo-area show: a free July 20 performance at outdoor Artpark. The inevitable comparison was to fellow jam band Umphrey’s McGee – a Chicago sextet about a decade younger than moe. – which had played Artpark just a month earlier, slaying the crowd with what frankly was a more aggressive and energetic brand of progressive rock, funk, and metal than the sound moe. brought to the table last summer. Fans were declaring moe. as past their prime and no longer able to match the intensity of groups like Umphrey’s McGee or the Disco Biscuits – jam bands that embraced the recent popularity of the electronica scene while moe.’s traditional rockand-roll sound remained relatively stagnant.
It’s funny what one show can do to a band’s reputation. moe. set the record straight on Wednesday night at the Town Ballroom in downtown Buffalo, playing their best Buffalo show in years and proving they are still relevant, energetic, and capable of reaching musical peaks that any rock band would envy. Fresh off the release of their 10th studio album, the surprisingly crisp What Happened to the La Las, moe. returned to the city where they formed – bassist/vocalist Rob Derhak and guitarist/vocalist Chuck Garvey formed the band in a UB dorm room, in fact – and found themselves in front of a rowdy soldout crowd. They didn’t disappoint, playing two sets of scorching rock-androll as the crowd’s cheering, dancing, and debauching grew wilder and wilder. The only two selections from moe.’s new album were the openers of each set – “Paper Dragon” and “Smoke,” two of the more interesting cuts from the disc. Other than those, all the
songs were old moe. favorites. Highlights from the first set included a Peter Frampton-style talk-box solo from Garvey on “Happy Hour Hero,” a singalong ode to drinking; the ultra-fast, bouncing reggae-ska of “Threw It All Away”; and a face-melting guitar tirade in 7/8 time from guitarist/vocalist Al Schnier to end set-closer “Crab Eyes.” moe. is perhaps best-known for Schnier and Garvey’s dueling guitars, and though Schnier was firing on all cylinders Wednesday night, it was Garvey who dropped the most jaws. He was in top form, sometimes switching back and forth between a bottleneck (for playing slide guitar) and a traditional plectrum within the span of alternating phrases. During “The Pit” – the centerpiece of the second set, a song about going down to hell – Garvey produced hitherto unheard of sounds from his axe, even grinding its strings against the microphone stand at one point. The guitar’s furious yelps and screams did evoke a trip down the River Styx, and all the while Garvey looked like he could
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Weather for the Weekend:
Courtesy of Nate Scheekloth moe.’s Chuck Garvey was in top form on Wednesday night, when the UB-bred band played downtown at the Town Ballroom.
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