The worst thing that could have happened was the Cubs winning, because now I think anything is possible with LU.

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Cigarboy sucks!

This is really a massive problem for Porter. He recruits all these talented players and then lets them rot on the bench for the entire season by playing a 6 man rotation. I think some of the younger players understand not playing in a close, back-and-forth conference game, but if I were Satterwhite, I'd be disappointed and disheartened to barely play 7 minutes in a blowout compared to Custer's 32 minutes. It's one thing to not get a chance to play in big moments, it's another thing to not even get a chance to play to develop.

There's no reason to push guys and zap their energy after the first timeout of the 2nd half. You're on the road, in altitude, after cross-country travel. Take the 1 loss this counts for and move on to UIC. Using a bigger bench should have been takeaway #1 from our AP vote earning December that led to our miserable February last season. I truly wonder if any assistant coach on his staff either realizes this or has a strong enough voice to push him on it.

No way. The reason I say this is that he has not changed at all in his time here.

It counts as only one loss, yes. And I had this as a loss on my game-by-game prognosis of the season back in October.

But this was a complete dismantling, make no mistake.

It's really difficult, but not impossible for us to win with 37% shooting from the field.

The problem was DEFENSE, which used to keep us in so many games against this kind of competition 2-3 years ago. How do you get out-rebounded 41-23? How do you let another team shoot 57.1% on threes on 28 attempts? They scored 48 points as a result of three-pointers, and we had only 53 points TOTAL.

Can we learn from this? I hope so. Are we going to get better? I'm pretty sure. But I think huge part of it is going to have to be attitude, confidence, and determination.

It’s way too early to throw in the towel after one loss and completely disregard the other seven wins. We win vs. UIC and go down to Gainesville and learn something from it, and we’re sitting at 8-2, which at the beginning of the season we would have been happy to be at that point.

Things to remember about this game:
1) it’s still early in the season;
2) the travel situation that started it off was horrendous and tough for any younger team to overcome;
3) We don’t have Richardson, who makes an enormous difference, leadership-wise, when he’s on the floor;
4) It’s not like we played our best and got hammered - if you go back and look at that first half, the number of near misses and unlucky bounces on the rim had nothing to do with getting outplayed - we just had a very very bad shooting night;
5) this was not a bad team that beat us. They are a good team who had the complete opposite night shooting than we had.

This loss is humbling, but it’s nothing we can’t come back from, and it’s certainly not indicative of exactly how good our team is. My biggest fear is that the team’s morale goes down after this. I’m in agreement that the starters needed to be pulled sooner and our bench needed to get a vote of confidence from our coach that he trusts them enough to compete, and he respects them enough give them a chance to prove their way into the rotation. We do not want those guys to throw in the towel on this team - guys like Satterwhite and Negron. Hopefully everyone recovers from this one and gets right back to business tomorrow.

Time to go home, get some rest (after 5 games in 10 days, at opposite ends of the Country), and take out the frustration from this game on UIC.

I think the real question is how does the team respond.....emotionally. For what every reason, be it travel, lots of games in a short amount of time,,they were delivered an ego deflating defeat, Can they chuck this one off, replay the Kent State tape and not the Boise St. tape and perform to their potential against UIC. Do the seniors help the youngsters recoop. I think a big student turnout would help...you know UIC will have a decent group there.....

I don't know what was going on in the first half with all those missed layups. That was painful.

That said... call me crazy, but I feel okay this morning. I actually thought we played halfway decent in the second half. They were just raining down threes on us, and there is not much you can do about it.

Ken Pomeroy has done a lot of research on three point defense (he just posted an new article a The Athletic yesterday), and it indicates that there is little a defense can do to affect shooting percentage if a team is determined to shoot threes. You can try to force them off the line which results in more two point shots, and that's where defense seems to carry over more from game to game. If you can defend the twos, you're in good shape. Last night Boise shot 50% from two, which is right around the D1 average. Opponents on the season are only shooting 43.7% from two against us, which is a big reason we have a top 100 defense.

We also blocked some shots, and our defensive rebounding was fine. (We got 75% of defensive rebounds; D1 average is about 70%).

On offense, while we held our turnovers to a reasonable number, we only had THREE offensive rebounds. I don't know how that's possible when we missed like 40 shots. Boise got 92% of their defensive rebounds. We are, yet again, one of the worst offensive rebounding teams in the country. I understand the tradeoffs of going for rebounds, but with Krutwig and Donte/Jackson on the floor, I expected improvement there.

To me the big question is why did we miss all those shots? Travel? Tired legs? Sniffing ourselves too much? Facing a bigger team? Hopefully it's not the latter because our conference competition is stout. Someone earlier mentioned how we played well against Wichita State, which is better and more athletic than Boise this year or New Mexico a couple years ago. So why did we get blown out in those games? Maybe it's unfamiliarity? Intimidation? I have no idea.

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MBB Scholarship Chart

6 games in 12 days across 3 timezones (including a holiday) definitely doesn't help. This was also a game where missing Richardson hurt a lot. He always gets up, but especially for the big games.

Ultimately it was a dreadful night offensively. I remember seeing Boise hasn't lost at home in non-con since 2013 or something like that, so it is a tough place to play, and they beat the redbirds by 20+ on a neutral court this year. I actually thought our defense for the first 10-15 minutes last night was really good; we forced turnovers but just couldn't capitalize on anything. After hot streaks against UNCW and Kent State there was bound to be a return to the norm a bit. Aundre was really the only one who could get anything going; and we looked kinda baffled at the 2-3 zone, our freshmen looked like freshmen... it's gonna happen. Burn the tape. Not many teams will hit 16 threes on you...

The response is now key.

The D is still a major work in progress without Milt. That will be a struggle for much of the year with all the new faces. Takes time to gel and understand what's needed. Its clear that we will have 5 new faces getting serious minutes once everyone's healthy.
Missing a big chunk of the team heart without Richardson in the lineup.
Boise St is the real deal -- terrific home record and I think will be a tourney team. We are still a ways off, but I like the squad and think we will keep getting better.
As for the minutes distribution - I would've pulled my starters much earlier...but I'm not the coach.