At the end of last season Head Coach Felicia Legget-Jack left the MAC tournament champion Bulls to take the job at Syracuse, She too with her the MAC POY and FOY. Also Dominique Camp transferred to Akron and is their star point guard. Buffalo had a great run over the last half dozen seasons, including a Sweet 16 appearance and 4 NCAA appearances. We have lost 13 in a row to UB, even Coach Duffy did not beat them.
So they have a new coach and pretty much a new roster this season. They are currently 8-9 ( 3-5) and are 4-5 on the road. In comparison, Miami is 8-13 ( 3-5) and 7-4 at home. In looking at UB’s nonleague schedule, it was dumbed down this year and not as tough as ours.
New coach Becky Burke has worked her way up over the past decade, turning several programs around. Last year she was Big South COY at South Carolina Upstate.
They have some very athletic guards who can really rebound 5-7 5th year player Zakiyah Winfield averages 14’6ppg and 10.6 rpg. She is leading the nation in rebounding by guards. 5-8 5th year player Jasmine Young averages 14.0ppg. 5.6 grad student Rashawna Stone averages 14.4ppg and 5.6 rpg. In their loss at Akron on Saturday 6-2 freshman Hannah Ogden had 5 threes for her career high of 15 points.
Again, this is a big game in our quest to make it to Cleveland for the first time in the Hentrich era. Here are the records of the bottom 7 teams in the MAC. Only the top 8 teams get to go to Cleveland.
6th WM 4-4 MAC’s leading scorer, Lauren Ross, did not play Saturday and they got drilled
7-9 Miami, EMU, and UB 3-5
10-11 NIU and CMU 2-6 NIU’s star center did not play Saturday.
We just seemed so poorly prepared once again. Once again, the opposition best 3 point shooter is standing wide open with no one within 10 feet of her and drains a trey to start the game. I think that is the second home game in a row that started that way. Eventually she finished 4 for 7 on threes ( all of her shots) and all 7 times she was wide open. Once again we handled end of the quarter situations badly. We wasted our last TO ( we called it with about 25 seconds to go after hitting a three, just beating them from calling it. Obviously they were going to call a TO to advance the ball, and after our TO was over they did call the TO to advance the ball. Then a few seconds later after we had fouled and they hit thier shots, we did not have a TO left to advance the ball and run an out of bounds play for a quick shot. This is typical of Hentrich’s late game time management.
We played most of the second quarter with Cluse and Wolf on the bench, which accounts for why we got so far behind. Wolf had 2 fouls, but Cluse was out just because she was playing poorly. She has been in a slump because when she drives she no longer shoots the ball, she just kind of throws it up there and hopes it will roll in. And nobody is correcting her and getting her back to using sound fundamental moves which she was doing earlier this season.
We got down 18 halfway through the 3rd quarter, then got our act together and rallied and tied it up with 3 minutes to go, but they immediately scored 5 quick points and although we kept scoring, they hit every free throw down the stretch.
Also, UB had a great defensvie effort against Wolf, who only had 2 points with a minute to go in the 3rd quarter, but she did end up with 12. We were forced into a zone most of the night because they had 3 very fast guards and we could not stay up with them. ( Both Wolf and Scott are slow D-1 guards, Peyton was not slow before her ACL and now wears a heavy brace).
Despite not being as fast or having that quick first step she used to have, Peyton Scott has score 50 points in our last 2 games. After going through a shooting slump, she is dialed in now.
Next up is a very tough assignment, playing at BG who has only lost 2 games all season. We got blown out when we played at Ball State and Toledo, those are the three best teams by a wide margin. It will take our best effort to hang with the Falcons, but it is possible.