Sour way to end the season; this is a game that we blew.

Tip of the hat to Chattanooga, they just executed way better than us 2nd half. They took it too us after the break and we did not wake up until under 10 mins left. We took way too many 3’s and stopped doing what worked first half, which was inside out. Jump shots were not falling and we just continued to jack them up. The defense was miserable 2nd half as well, how many pick and rolls and back door cuts did we allow? Just a poor showing second half. Disappointing.

Tough way to go out

LUC to Chat
3FG 33% to 43%
FT 82% to 70%
TO 11 to 8
Pts off TOs 8 to 14
Reb 22 to 29 (Offensive 5 to 10)
2nd chance pts 5 to 12
Paint Pts 30 to 38
Bench pts 25 to 22

Offensive rebounds and 2nd chance hurt us and as already mentioned back door cuts too often. When they caught us immediately after half time I had a sick feeling about the game.

Fouls caught up to us in the 2nd half as well.

Overall, a good year.

Drew is getting better and we need that.
Very interested to see what happens now in the portal with the players eligible to play and who we pick up.

Go Ramblers!

I disagree goodnight. Overall, it was a bad year. Sure, we had 25 wins . But they were all against bad to mediocre teams. Our 12 losses were to bad to mediocre teams.
Face it. The A-10 is a second rate conference.

_________________
Let's go Braden!

Haven’t posted in years but dropping in to say this is an impressively bad, lazy, and overall sour grapes take. Bravo. We literally had a quad one win last week against a high level SF team and are talking about basketball games in April. Oh and the A10 finished the season 6 out of 31 in RPI and 7th in NET. Team coulda folded with injuries. Team coulda just not tried in the NIT. None of that happened.

Agree this was a game we should have had. One of 11 other losses we should have won……

Wasn’t too impressed with the first half. Seemed like they did just the bare minimum to have a lead, which was up to 9 at one point before Chatt went on a 7-0 run before half. Chatt wasn’t hitting their threes in the first half, which kept us in the game until Chatt began hitting more and more of them in the second. Then out of halftime we got blitzed by their offense and give up 46 in the half. Defense was very poor throughout the game. Thought Chatt had a great and nice looking offense. Had a feeling that if they got going like they did, we weren’t going to keep up with them. They’re going to give Irvine trouble on Thursday.

Des with a misery game.

Despite the height advantage on the interior and with our bigs, we didn’t play to this advantage enough. Miles and DeLoach BOTH had outstanding game and were unstoppable.

Pretty good play called out of the 1-minute timeout. If Jayden hits we go up 75-74 with less than a minute left. IMO should have drawn something up for Miles or DeLoach, because Chatt couldn’t stop them. Sucks it didn’t go and worse we couldn’t score again thereafter.

Hopefully this wasn’t the last we see of Miles, Dawson, Quinn or others who could / should be returning next year. Big week or two ahead……

You serious? I don't know how you can call this a bad year. Was it great? No. But it was a good year for the program overall. And what "first rate" conference would you (realistically) like to see Loyola in?

DeLoach & Rubin finished a combined 11/11 in this game. We shouldn't have stopped feeding them. UTC's bigs had no answers and were stuck fouling or giving up an easy layup. Feel like we got sped up in the 2nd half and tried playing their game--shooting 3's and jump shots, rather than getting it to Rubin and running some offense.

Chattanooga is a good squad though. I can see how they beat Dayton and Bradley before us. They'll be a fun matchup vs UC-Irvine, who is a defensive-minded, physical team.

Tough game, ultimately came down to a couple late loose balls that didn't go our way, and that last shot going in, etc. The 2nd half scoring drought killed us, but you kind of knew they would fight back. It was a very typical performance for this year's team, the good and the bad.

But it all kind of pales in comparison to the news that Miles is coming back, and IMO the favorite for A10 player of the year next year. Great job from all involved to keep him on board -- hope to see JD is next!

Some thoughts:

Season Thoughts:

This was a strange year and a strange teams. I keep going back and forth with whether this team overachieved or underachieved. We had some injuries we fought through. We looked really good for stretches and really bad for stretches, often times during the games themselves!

I am also torn with whether this coaching staff did a good or bad job coaching this group. It took a long time to clean up some things like our turnover issue and getting everyone on the same page defensively. We were slow at times during games make adjustments. We had long stretches when we went into offensive droughts or played hero ball.

Chattanooga Thoughts:

This game was a microcosm of our season. We cane out and played a good 15 minutes of the 1st half and appeared to take control of the game up 9. This was despite a flurry of turnovers which lead to Chat getting easy points to keep it close. Then we had a miserable last 5 minutes of the half where we went into a scoring drought and let them back into the game giving them confidence. Drew allowed a 7 point run and did not call the use it or lose it timeout to stem the tide. We started to miss/settle for 3 pt shots. This bad offense carried over into the 2nd half. Our defense was not good, we failed rebound and gave up second chance points and way too many back door easy layups. We fell behind by 10 points late and then had a furious comeback to get to within one with the ball only to go scoreless the last 3 or 4 plus minutes. Frustrating.

We failed to make any adjustments. Our three point shooting became very erratic during this game. The scoring droughts were unacceptable especially when you consider Rubin and Deloach were 11-11 from the floor. Chat showed they had zero ability to guard either of them and I think Rubin and Deloach between the two of them may have had 3 old fashioned 3 point plays. Yet, when we were in the middle of the scoring droughts we did not look to throw it the low post. We kept jacking up threes. I get that we often live and die with the 3, but if we used the bigs a little more, we probably win this game.

Well, Miles did say he was coming back. Let's see what Dawson does. It's now Portal Season!

Unfortunately,this year's NCAA tournament a likely signal that the SEC, Big 10 and maybe the Big12, will dominate the sport, with maybe one or two ACC teams, and maybe one or two BE teams, breaking through once in a while. Even the days of the BE being considered a P5 conference is likely a thing of the past. If anything, the BE, the next logical place for Loyola to set its sights on, will never look to expand with a team from a conference like the A10, but will look at the ACC or the like.

It was an impressive season in many ways. I think we met or surpassed expectations.

We need to remember how much we lost from the year before.

We lost 3 of our top 4 scorers.
We lost our best player, Braden Norris. Braden lead the team in assists, three pointers (42.9%) and free throw percentage. He played 35 minutes a game. He ran the team.
We lost our point guard after 9 games.
Lots of issues needed to be solved that is probably why we had a weaker schedule.

As for the year, our best returning player had a good year, but did not improve statistically.
Sheldon Edwards became the force that we thought he would be.
Jayden Dawson looks like he has taken the next step.
Jalen Quinn improved.
Rubin is becoming a force at both ends of the court.

We generally improved after the injury setbacks. In January, I thought we were going to struggle to have a winning record. Moore, Dawson and Houinsou were injured. It looked awful. Admittedly, we had parts of the game that looked like we lacked the ability to knock the other team out. However, we were good and competitive. Other than the St Louis game, we were in every game. At the end of the day, we were less than a minute from going to the NIT finals. We had two opportunities to take the lead with less than 2 minutes left. Both Des and Jayden had the chance to put us ahead with just over a minute left. We had an opportunity to pull within a basket with 19 seconds left.

It is not what we aspire. We want to play in the NCAA tournament, but it was a good, impressive and entertaining season.

It wasn't so long ago we aspired to be DePaul.