The scene with 5 minutes left in the game.
Waking up this morning and reading about last night’s game was like stabbing yourself in the eye with a fork. Why bother? It’s games like last night’s (and ODU, Duke, Tennessee) where one wonders if we’re truly for real. Once things got tough in the second half, we looked like a JV squad out there, eerily reminiscent of our entire game against Duke.
As I sat at a Mexican restaurant last night (Don Juan’s in Kernersville, NC, if you wanted to know), I was on pins and needles waiting for text updates from my loyal friends. At first they were good, Niners were up early and seemed to be playing well. Then Dayton took the lead, and my gut, along with the ridiculous amounts of chips and salsa I consumed, dropped. Something told me, it’s about to get ugly. But as per the course with Niner fandom, there was a glimmer of hope as Gokhan SeerHAN (is Sirin that hard to pronounce? where did the H come from?) drained a three to bring the Niners within a possession at halftime.
I was able to get home just in time to watch Dayton start to kick the living crap out of us. With Phil and Chris on the bench, the Flyers took off and had a field day. We never stood a chance in the second half. We were outscored by 25 points in 20 minutes of basketball. That is ridiculous. When did Dayton get so good? Now they’ve beaten two teams tied for first place by over 20 points. How did the Flyers lose to Saint Joseph’s? And how did our 11-20 team beat this same team one year ago in Halton? Trying to understand Charlotte basketball is like trying to understand women, but worse.
There’s an alarming trend starting to surface, and it’s a scary one indeed. While we may have a tendency to fight with teams and pull out a tough W, it seems that once the margin gets beyond 10-12 points in the second half we give up and just let the game get out of hand. For the six games we’ve lost, the margin has been over 23 points. That is not the sign of a team that fights through anything. If the game isn’t going well on the road (double digit margin) with 15 minutes left, might as well go pour another beer, because it’s going to get so ugly the beer goggles will be necessary to see any positives from the rest of the game. The only loss where we really stood a chance at all was Georgia Tech, and that was at home. If you throw away the Georgia Tech game and look at just road losses, we’re losing by over 26 points. While margin of victory really means nothing in college basketball, the tendency of this team to curl into the fetal position is frightening, to say the least. We’re willing to fight when we think we have a chance, but there’s a point at which the team just says, “Screw this, we’re going to lose anyway, might as well try and break new records!”
I tried to get NLP to exchange emails with me this morning, but he’s still trying to recover from last night, rumor is he
What said flyer may look like.
was last seen around Charlotte posting “Missing: SWAGGER If found, please see Bobby Lutz” flyers on anything and everything. However, he did manage to steal some computer time away from the pervs at the local public library to send this brief, but correct breakdown of the Niners…
It’s pretty simple. If you play tough man-to-man defense and you’re playing at home you will beat the Niners. Handily. If you play zone, or matador defense, you’re just plain stupid. The scouting report is very much out.
There you go, to beat the Niners, don’t be stupid.
I will say this though, when a team shoots 25% from the floor and 14.3% from 3 on the road, they don’t stand a chance. We got buzzsawed, folks, but it would have been nice if we started throwing 2 X 4s into the blade instead of our arms and limbs.
But since GreenTintedGlasses.net is committed to being outwardly biased, there are two big positives to remember:
- We’re still tied for first place with Xavier and Richmond
- We still have chances to lock up an At-Large
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