A year after Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and a year before man landed on the moon, we witnessed another moment in our history that, when you come right down to it, was probably just as culturally significant.
Its origin and contents are like the lyrics to your alma mater: two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.
Launched in Pittsburgh (bizarrely), originally called the “Aristocrat,” we know it by its iconic two-syllable moniker: the Big Mac.
Before long, the Madison Avenue oracles that are absurdly good at such things suggested that this 540-calorie experience was the only thing that could curb the effects of a phenomenon classified by doctors as a “Big Mac Attack.”
Flash forward four-and-a-half decades to this Wednesday night, when we will be treated to a similar experience with an altogether different kind of Big Mac attack. One that requires all capital letters in the middle.
As we creep into the final two weeks of what has been a long college basketball season, we’re about to witness one of the game’s finest and most alluring aspects: a solid conference’s two finest teams going head-to-head with the regular-season league title - and all the conference tourney advantages that go with it - at stake.
With most conferences splitting into superfluous divisions, games with this level of significance are a bit harder to find than they were 15 or 20 years ago. And yet on Wednesday night - 7:00 tip-off on SportsTime Ohio, no less - we’ll get a Super-Sized helping.
The Ohio Bobcats and the Akron Zips, unquestionably the best teams in the MAC this year, will square off in Athens with more at stake than you might think, particularly since it’s still February.
Basketball coaches around the country have taken note of the special season that the Akron Zips are having. They’ll get a chance to validate their top-25 ranking when they head to Athens to take on the Ohio Bobcats on Wednesday night. The 24th-ranked Zips take an 18-game winning streak into this clash of the MAC’s two top teams and it’s likely the last game that stands between the Zips and a #1 seed for the MAC Tournament.
Not sure if the news has reached all of Northeast Ohio, let alone the country, but heading into this Friday night’s ESPN Bracket Buster matchup with North Dakota State, the Akron Zips are the rather unheralded owners of college basketball’s longest current winning streak, having vanquished 17 straight opponents dating back to mid December. This remarkable run—combined with a 21-4 overall record and 12-0 mark in Mid-American Conference play—would seem to make Akron a more than viable candidate for an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament this March, or at least a Top 25 AP ranking in the meantime. Instead, the unranked Zips will almost certainly need to win the MAC Tournament once again to find their way to the Big Dance, regardless of how the final five games of their regular season may play out. This is partly a consequence of playing in a mid-major conference that hasn’t sent two teams to the Tourney since 1999. But for this year’s Zips, in particular, a near miss may boil down to something far more unjust— a “clerical error.”