Games 23-26
Lost at home by 3 to NIU who had 1 MAC win at the time.
Lost on road by 20 to below .500 Sun Belt team
Won at home by 21 against 9th place MAC team
Lost on road by 19 to 5-7 MAC team who had lost 6 straight MAC games
With 5 freshman and multiple transfers - whatever our record ended up my hope was for this team to get better as the season went on. It doesn’t feel like we are.
First of all, we’re playing like a team in which 6 of its top 10 players are in their first year of Division 1 basketball, up and down. And I suppose I’m in the minority that freshmen are freshmen for their entire freshman year. Playing a year of Division 1 basketball from start to finish is way more intense and taxing than your senior year of high school basketball, even if you go to state in high school because during the high school regular season, you can just turn it on and off against certain teams. You can’t do that in college. Even Dean and Bultman who have played college basketball haven’t experienced this kind of intensity and pressure for an entire year. The freshmen who play better as the year progresses are exceptions.
To tonight, I thought we started ok. Then Western’s streaky shooters got hot and made everything while we missed a few good looks. Once we got behind, then our shot selection worsened and only got better during our run at the end of the 1st half. But credit to Hunter and Mirambeaux for getting us back in the game at the end of the 1st half. I don’t think we made any major adjustments, our seniors stepped up for that stretch.
At the beginning of the 2nd half, we turned the ball over and resumed our poor shot selection while Western made some nice adjustments. First, Titus Wright didn’t play or barely played in the 2nd half. When Wright was in the game, we could score down low and face a less intimidating presence in the lane. Western stuck with Brown and Burton the rest of the game and that gave us problems at both ends. Second, in the 1st half, Western ran quite a bit of high pick and roll with their bigs, but they ran it so far out that even Mirambeaux could recover back down to the block to find his man. In the 2nd half, they scored off back-to-back pick and rolls from the elbow, taking advantage of Mirambeaux jumping out, but being unable to get back before the pass got there.
This time, we didn’t recover from our poor shot selection and started making a number of defensive mistakes. The one guy we couldn’t leave open from 3 was Lobsinger and he went 4/6. We also got beat off the dribble repeatedly, their first step was too quick.
Maybe even more simply, their guards stepped up and made shots and ours didn’t. Cooper, Ipsaro, Bultman, Dean, and Mabrey were absent tonight. Add in Elmer’s foul trouble and it was an uphill climb offensively. One of the keys going forward is someone in our backcourt scoring consistently to complement the output we normally get from Hunter, Elmer, Mirambeaux, and Potter.
Let’s hope we respond on Saturday like Western did tonight. Getting to Cleveland is no guarantee, especially with our schedule and inexperience.
Nice run to end the first half but I never saw any kind of fire tonight. I wasn’t surprised the second half turned out like it did. I was surprised, though, at how badly we shot. You can’t beat Earlham shooting 33% and 28% from three.
When did he say that? If it was before the suspensions, that was a very reasonable take. Adding Safford to the mix and getting Mirambeaux at full conditioning would absolutely make us a top 3 team in this version of the MAC.
After the suspensions.
Sadly, I typically watch the postgame presser. It was sometime early-ish in the season.
Who got suspended?
Poor wording by me. After Safford left and Mirambeaux was known to be missing time.