So now, at 2-4, I guess we've got to root for Illinois State to beat Drake tonight to stay out of a tie for the basement headed into a string where we play the top three teams in the league. Ugggghhh. The SIU and Evansville games will loom larger over the next two weeks.

Go Redbirds!

One difference, though far from the only one, between home and road: Doyle is shooting something like 57% at home and 32% on the road according to my back of the envelope math.

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MBB Scholarship Chart

I think the team has played well enough at times to show they can compete. So look at three games against the top teams as three opportunities. They won't be favored in any of them, but two of them are at home and winning any one of the three games would be really great. The glass is half full!

Again I say--
--We played their type of game--not ours--Theirs, Oxen Ball--Ours ,Hoops
--We are young and fragile
--I did mis-speak we I said we always got beat by Oxen-ball. When I was at LUC. that was what was played--until Kentucky and Indiana came along. We quickly learned--AFTER we lost in the finals of the 1949 NIT to San Fran. 48-47--That was the end of that.

Today's game--We got beaten by Oxen-ball a throw back---We can do better than Forties style Hoops.
BTW , Turk cannot score from the bench--It is not legal. WE needed offense today--We were allowed prescious little of that.

We will do better--a learning experience for all---Why ? Because we are better than that garbage. I do not see this as MVC style Hoops.

I beg to differ, Brot. Evansville is a pretty high scoring team. They've only played four games on the year where they've scored 53 points or fewer-- a 31-point loss at Indiana, a 57-51 loss at home to Jackson State, an 80-53 drubbing at home by Northern Illinois, and today's 53-48 victory. They scored 100 points at home in a win against Valpo, 96 in a win against Grambling, and 89 in a win against Mercer. I think our best shot at win at their place was just how we went about it. But unfortunately, we made too many turnovers and couldn't establish our three point shooting.

Mercer and Grambling ? Well, they did win those-- I naturally blamed them because we seem to have the team that can score--I hope to Heaven we were not the cause of Oxen ball --That will be on the Coach then--PLEASE tell me it is not so.
You and I go way back--We have had this discussion before ad nauseum. I have always said teams that play that way have little if any offense.

Mercer is a pretty decent team this year-- they're 12-5, and #71 in the RPI. We know that Valpo is a solid program in the Horizon. E-Ville's Grambling win was a blowout. My point is that if Evansville had their choice, they'd look to run and gun and win games in the low-mid 80s in which they just plain outshoot their competition.

I used to be with you, Brot, wanting to see a game with some speed and athleticism. But I've come to especially appreciate teams that can take the other team out of their comfort zone, and that was indeed what we did. If another team's comfort zone was keeping the pace below what we feel good about, I'd look to speed things up. It's more about dictating the terms of play and setting the pace to our liking than deliberately trying to make things ugly. If we'd done the job taking care of the ball and hitting just three of our eight misses from behind the arc, maybe the score would have been 57-53 Loyola-- which I think is what we were looking for.

This seems to be a case of "typical Loyola." Just when you think things are turning around and might be in our favor...we get back to our losing ways. Sure, some of it comes down to being on the road but at some point we have to get past that. Evansville is not good and we held their top player mostly in check. When you go up against that combo, you have to win...road or not.

It's all just disappointing.

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Cigarboy sucks!

What was your era as a student at Loyola? I seem to recall it being somewhere around 2003-06. Well, that was just after an absolutely miserable period, roughly from 1994-2001. Going into the 2001-02 season, we had something like a 22 game road losing streak, and we lost the first two or three road games of that year.

One game in that road losing streak that sticks out to me in particular was a game at Chicago State, when we had a one point lead and the ball with less than two seconds left. Our inbound pass hit one of the rafters, turning the ball over, and Chicago State's inbound pass under their basket resulted in a game-winning catch and shoot at the buzzer. You can't get much worse than that. The UC Davis game this year reminded me of that.

But in the 2001-02 season, the coaching staff backed off a little and let the players sort it out. The players were damn tired of losing, and had a lot of talent, but (my perception was) they felt constrained by sideline coaching micromanagement. The coaches made the game plans, prepped the players, and made the substitutions, but they gave a lot of autonomy to the on-court leaders to enforce execution through peer leadership. I thought this made a big difference. And you can see a lot of this in our road records from late 2001 through 2011. We won our first 6 conference games in 2001-02, and we made it to the conference tournament final.

Thereafter, for the next decade, we won some improbable and BIG road games-- including several games against ranked Butler at Hinkle, against Detroit at Calahan, against Milwaukee, and against Georgia at a neutral site. Those are probably some of the games you probably remember fondly, but they came after a long period where we had double-digit losing streaks on the road in general and at several particular venues. For about a decade, we didn't really have a fear or paralysing dread of the road, but I think it's back in our minds now.

As a coach, the instinct is to direct. And when the team doesn't perform well, the instinct is to direct a little more. At some point the equilibrium gets out of balance, and the smart, talented, high basketball IQ kids that you recruited become fixated on matching footprints to dance steps. I think sometimes the coaches have to loosen the reins a little and hand over some of the responsibility for performance and execution to the players themselves to get them more invested. It doesn't mean that the coaches are just spectators, it means offering a challenge to players who might benefit from more options. It's a hard thing to do for coaches, but sometimes it has a better effect than exhiling a player to the end of the bench to dwell on thier not following orders to perfection.

That's just my take.