We've played enough games that we can start to see some trends about the team emerging.  The one that has intrigued me the most is rebounding.

Last year, we were a below-average offensive rebounding team, mainly because we usually elected to fall back on defense rather than try to recover our misses.  The Bobcats retrieved 32.4% of offensive rebound opportunities last year, 190th in the country.  That rate fell 29.9% in conference play, 10th in the MAC.  They were less successful on the defensive end, only grabbing 66.3% of rebound opportunities, 230th nationally.  In MAC play, it was 65.4%, again 10th.

This year has been very different... on the offensive end.  We rank 54 in the country with a 39.1% offensive rebounding rate.  It will be interesting to see if that success holds up come conference play.  We're still poor on the defensive boards, though, with a 66.9% d-rebound rate, 215th in the country.

Defensive rebounds, too, and it's been the defensive effort that has triggered my criticism.

Touche.

Good observation.  Last night, the 'Cats got 36.7% of misses while only rebounding 58.1% of Santa Clara misses.

Didn't realize he was hurting.  Any info or timeline for 100%?  Will a week with no game help at all?

He said something about it when he was home in September then his girlfriend said he had not been playing because of it when she was down there a couple of games back.

Bigs are our biggest weakness right now IMO. Not that we don't have good ones just that we have no one where we can feed the ball into and know they are going to make good decisions. Last year it was KVK, year before Tillman, year before Leon Williams. DeVaughn and Baltic aren't natural back to the basket type players so when they do try those moves it takes an extra second or two longer than someone who is used to it. That second or two may not seem like a big deal to the casual fan but that allows a shifting defense to get set in what it needs to be. If one of our bigs can establish themselves as a go to guy down low that's going to take a ton of pressure off of DJ as most teams probably have the motto of "cut off Cooper, cut off the team" type of philosophy against us.