Great game and awesome win!
No doubt there are some good ones out there, but college refs are typically college refs because they aren’t very good refs. Those 3 made an absolute mockery of that game last night. Glad we came out on the winning side.
Credit to Mullin for aggressively using those timeouts when he did and not worrying about saving any. If he had saved them it might have been for nothing. We were on the ropes (22 points allowed and however many turnovers a little over 6 mins into the 2nd half turning a 9 point halftime lead into a 6 point deficit) and if we didn’t try to stabilize it as many times as we could then we might not have been able to.
A comforting thing about this team’s prospects the next few months and certainly next year is that they make it so much harder than it needs to be. They do so many things wrong and still find a way to win some of these games. Allow 62% shooting from the field, turn the ball over 17 times (sometimes multiple possessions in a row), don’t stop the ball on defense, over-extend defensively, all sorts of missed assignments defensively leading to dunks and open 3s, so many no pass or 1 pass possessions, and we might be one of the first teams in the history of basketball to have a miscommunication on whether or not we wanted one of our best players to foul (and foul out) with 1:36 to go when we just took a 1 point lead. It’s like if usually takes 100% to win a game we have to give 120% to get there. Cutting out that 20% should not be that difficult which gives me reason for optimism.
Even with this when our guards go like they went last night feel like we can mix it up with a lot of teams. Feel like when we get 40+ from them we have a chance a lot of nights.
A lot of credit to Owens, Williams, and Ahmed, who really compete inside despite often playing out of position and undersized.
Pretty incredible that they are at 4 conference wins halfway through the conference slate. Had them at 7-11 before the season and would love to see them get there, would be such marked progress from last year even despite the bad losses (and how poor some of the not-bad losses have been). Getting ahead, but would almost be ideal given where we are to finish 7th, get DePaul in the first round, and maybe line us up with Butler (team at top of conference I think we match up best with) in Quarters of BET.
