Milwaukee 94, Youngstown State 87 (OT) It’s all rather overwhelming to absorb: Nearly three full months of blood, sweat and energy; three months of struggle, strain and sacrifice; three months of gut-busting expenditures, and all of it can come down to a fraction of an inch. Yes, that miniscule margin was all that determined the [...]

Detroit 77, Wright State 67 Two teams that didn’t sniff the 2011 Horizon League championship will try to make mischief at the conference tournament over the next week. If Friday night’s regular-season finale was any indication of things to come, some young men from Detroit – with more basketball courage than the mutiny-making Pistons of [...]

Wisconsin-Milwaukee 87, Cleveland State 83 If you want to say that the team in control of the Horizon League has come from nowhere to shock the rest of its rivals, that’s a reasonably fair statement to make. However, the more precise and accurate way to summarize a Milwaukee-rooted resurrection is to say that this band [...]

Valparaiso 80, Missouri State 67 The weekend from hell for the Missouri Valley Conference is now complete. Two days after the Colonial Athletic Association clocked one Valley contender in a bubble battle, the Horizon League got a piece of the MVC’s other bigshot in another pretender-contender clash. A BracketBusters matchup between the second place team [...]

Wisconsin-Milwaukee 79, Valparaiso 76 So that’s the way it’s gonna be, eh? The Horizon League is apparently destined to remain as cluttered, clamorous, and just plain crazy as it’s been all season long. Just when clarity was on the verge of emerging in this American Heartland section of the mid-major kingdom, the Wisconsin-Milwaukee Panthers decided [...]

Cleveland State 74, Wright State 72 In what has turned into a yo-yo of a season, the kids from Cleveland, Ohio, certainly hope that they won’t fall downward again in the winter of 2011. The Cleveland State Vikings defeated the Wright State Raiders in Horizon League competition from the Nutter Center in Dayton, Ohio, on [...]

Valparaiso 58, Wright State 56 In a conference whose race is cluttered even as it careens toward the finish line, at least one thing can safely be said: Wright State won’t take home the 2011 Horizon League title. The Valparaiso Crusaders held on to defeat the Wright State Raiders in a hotly contested Horizon League [...]

Butler 71, Wright State 63 If you hate headaches, you must hate the evolution of the 2011 Horizon League basketball season. Of all the conferences in Division I men’s basketball this year, the Horizon has confounded, confused and utterly befuddled the national press corps and the full army of hoops pundits who try, sometimes desperately, [...]

Butler 73, Cleveland State 61 The chances that the Butler Bulldogs will win the regular-season Horizon League championship are slim to none. The chances that last year’s national runner-up will host the semifinals and finals of its league tournament – as has so often been the case in recent years – are virtually nil. Just [...]

Cleveland State 76, Valparaiso 65 On a night when the Butler Bulldogs lost yet again, it’s quite reasonable to say that the passing of the torch in the Horizon League just might have begun in earnest. In a battle of the top two squads from the Horizon League, it was the Cleveland State Vikings who [...]