First half -- we saw just how good this team can be.
Second half -- we saw just how bad this team can be.
I have never witnessed such incongruence in two halves of college basketball. Very disappointing; very disheartening. I went with a friend of mine (who is not a Hoyas fan) and we agreed that it wasn't until the game was basically over that we thought the Hoyas would lose. We were clearly the better team and completely dominated the first half. In the second half, we looked like the team that lost to Temple by 18 in our first game of the season. I would love to hear some explanation for what happened. We couldn't hit a shot; we couldn't grab a rebound. (And give Vandy some credit--I don't think they missed a shot in the last 10 mintues of the game.) This makes the games against Oregon and Illinois so much more important.
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3 comments:
diamond, as i didn't watch the game (aside from cell phone score updates), i was shocked at the outcome given the 1st half score.
was there any theme to the 2nd half collapse (key foul outs / foul trouble, turnovers) or was it just vandy's hot shooting that did us in?
also, i must admit that i don't know much about vandy. is this a loss of what should have been a can't lose game?
Vandy was a very good team. We should have won but this is not an embarassment, like losing to JMU would have been. That said, we are better and should have won this game on our home court. If it had been away, it would have been a draw. (Of course, that presumes that we have a home court advantage -- a whole other topic.)
As to any theme, well we stopped attacking the basket and loosened up on defense. Vandy got very hot from outside. We had 5 or 6 suspect calls go against us in a 15 minute period (a couple of touch fouls, a 10 second violation, a blown out-of-bounds call, and a travel). The refs weren't great but I think we really got the short end of that stick at the wrong time. And, frankly, our offense was out of sync the whole game. We scored a lot in the first half on turnovers and drives to the hoop. During the course of the game, we blew all five backdoor cuts attempted. That can't happen.
One big positive from the game: the gray home unis are back.
FYI: It was just announced that JTIII's wife has cancer. She went into surgery the day before the Vandy game. Evidently, they have kept this a complete secret, but he has been missing practices. Hopefully, she will pull through -- no more details yet.
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