Saturday, November 27, 2010

Things Could Get Ugly

for the 2010/2011 Hoops Dawgs. Reminds me of the feeling I had early in the season about the football team.

Some would say that we're very fortunate not to be 0 and 5 at this point. None of our victories have been that impressive. Last minute wins over lower tier teams are not going to instill confidence in the fan base. As a point in case, Liberty University beat Mississippi Valley State yesterday by 6 points on a neutral court.

Sure, Trey has been out and is rusty in his return, but we shouldn't use that excuse to gloss over our weaknesses. We have an advantage in the post over a lot of our opponents, but if our guards turn the ball over, we can't stop dribble penetration, and we can neither make nor defend the three, then we are going to lose to the elite teams.

So where are we? We're 3 and 2 after last night's loss to Temple. Can we beat Manhattan? Unless we're a lot worse than I think, we should win this one to go 4 and 2.

UAB on December 3 and Georgia Tech on the 7th are probably toss-ups at this point. If we're not on our game, we could lose to Tech. They have a roster full of guards who could get hot at just the wrong time of the season for the Dawgs.

After the Tech game, we'll likely feast for the rest of December on the lower-ranked teams. Then the SEC portion of the schedule looms.

We have Kentucky at home, then go to Vandy. We play Mississippi at their place, Tennessee and Mississippi State, Florida and then go to Kentucky. Sure, we "have to play the games," but knowing what we know now, where are the W's?

Any ideas?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Very underwhelmed with Fox so far. I put both of the losses on him, especially Thursday night's.

You think we might practice against a zone defense sometime this year? I am pretty sure that every opponent we play the rest of this season will go to a 2-3 zone until we show that we actually have a play to run against it.

Why in the hell was Nolte ever guarding Scooty last night? Makes no sense. I know that it is critical that we sign Evan Nolte next year, but will we have to do that at the expense of this year's season? Makes little sense to me.

Very underwhelmed by the development of Marcus Thornton. Was expecting him to improve every game, but he looks like he is not going to provide much, if anything this season.