ESPN+. Miami is 4-1, Western Kentucky is 6-0. They beat us 91-55 last year despite the fact than we were ahead at halftime. Historically they are 7-0 against Miami and have won 4 conference USA championships in the last 10 years. Coach Greg Collins has107 wins and this is his 7th season.
While they are 6-0, they have not played a power schedule by any means. I would say their talent is similar to ours but this is an established program and is a year or two ahead of us. We have only played one road game and lost it to a team not of WK’s level. We have had a week of needed practice, we will see how we match up with a good Mid major program.
Beat Indiana State by 12
Beat Kentucky State by 55
Beat Mercer by 24
Beat Abilene Christian by 4
Beat North Dakota by 5
beat Tennessee State by 32
Their best players seem to be two Freshmen and a sophomore
Another big test for the team. Coach Box said he looked forward to this week off between games to practice more. Hopefully pays off. He was pretty enthusiastic when I spoke with him last.
Well we lost 79-60. The good news is we only had 3 turnovers in the second half. The bad news is we had 22 turnovers in the first half. Enj with 22 points. Tretter with 17. Singer with 6 assists. Tretter with 9 boards. Enj and Tretter took 29 of our 52 shot attempts. WKU with 4 players in double figures. WKU shot 54% from three. Next up Dayton who is 5-3 on 12/5.
.Just watched the replay tonight. Our start was just as terrible as our other road game at Xavier. We were just totally not ready to handle the pressure and get into our offense when the game started. I don’t know if I have ever seen us make 15 turnovers in the first quarter before but that is what we did. After we worked our way back into the game they came out and hit 8 of 8 on threes in the third quarter and put up I think 35 points in the 3rd. Unbelievably, last year we were ahead at half against them and they scored 39 in the third quarter. We were down 30 at the end of 3 but they stopped hitting and we got it back to 19. We play another tough road game Thursday night at Dayton. They are improved but not as good as Western.
After the first quarter we did better on turnovers and ended up with 25, Western had 20 which was high for them too. We shot Ok and had a slight rebounding edge. Western just shot tremendously, 54% on 3’s and 88% on free throws. There were some bad calls against us, which are especially hard to take when things are going badly.
This loss was similar to the Xavier game where we also came out not ready to play and turnovers against pressure and giving up open threes got us quickly down 18. Our 3 primary ball handlers, Singer, Gonzalez, and Chandler had 17 turnovers between them.
Singer and Gonzalez tend to drive past their defender toward the bucket and leave their feet and get caught in the air with nowhere to go and throw it away. They should be jump stopping and shooting a little jumper when they get cut off. The other correctable thing I see is that girls without the ball are not moving to create an open passing lane and good man to man teams who try to overlay and deny passing lanes are getting a lot of steals against us.
You very adequately described the game as I saw it. None of our point guards could take control of our offense. First and third quarters were disasters. First quarter was our offensive incompetence.Third quarter was WKU’s offensive excellence. Beat Dayton!