We received quite a bit of criticism for our responses on Twitter on Monday to criticism of our article on the Wichita State - Illinois State game, and we apologize if we offended anyone involved.

In the past, we have had several good exchanges with fans from teams that disagreed with our viewpoints here at Mid-Major Madness. At the end of those, we felt there was at least a calm decision to agree to disagree.

Monday that was not the case. Our attempts to summarize the ideas on the article in question, and the subsequent conversation that continued in the comments, failed with at least a couple of those people engaged on Twitter.

They always say you shouldn't poke the bear. Well, once the insults started rolling in, we took the stick, poked the bear, then knocked down the beehive and tried to send the bees in the opposite direction.

The calm, rational thing to do would have been to let it go. That would have been easy had we not had repeated reminders that certain people on Twitter were trying to bring down what we have worked over the last nine months to rebuild here at Mid-Major Madness. It wasn't necessarily that they disagreed with what we wrote. It was that they took that to a personal level and attacked all the work being done here on the site.

We should have let it go. We didn't, and it got out of hand.

Part of that stems from my personal situation Monday, and a lot of stress outside of running this site. Some of us here have real jobs here. Some of those real jobs had real deadlines Monday that got in the way of us thinking clearly.

If you are reading this, we hope you will continue to read the work put out by our writers here, from the ones in college to the ones that are ... quite a ways removed from undergrad. We hope that the events Monday on Twitter don't impact your desire to keep up with the best -- and some of the worst -- in mid-major basketball.

As always, comments are welcome. We just ask you keep it civil.