bierce

Mark not on the floor to start the half. Pryor in. Mark hurt too?

Big thing to take to the locker room. Don't give it to Onyema 12 feet from the basket in the last second of a possession and expect him to make a shot. OK, that was a really bad half of basketball. We were nuked on the boards. 10 offensive rebounds to 2. Couple that with A&M +2 in turnover margin, and A&M had ten more offensive possessions than us. You can't win that way. You usually can't stay in the game that way. Without Kaluma or Weaver, we are pathetic at rebounding, and if that doesn't change, we're going to lose a lot more games and by big margins. Some of A&M's torrid hot shooting was just that, but too much of it was our guys being lax in guarding the arc. Our offense struggled, but it was at least trying to function before we got to the stretch after Pope dribbled off his foot and Codie hesitated after being fed on the baseline. After that we had three straight possessions get wasted by Johnson and Mark trying to do it all by themselves. Terry settled them down after the timeout, but it's too little, too late. I doubt we will see a comeback for a close loss the way we did against Auburn, since I don't see us competing inside at all. I liked some of what I saw from Codie and Pryor. Not all by any means, and I still wonder why Vinson doesn't even get to sniff the floor when Shedrick and Kent are being absolutely overwhelmed inside.

Better defense by him the next two possessions. Went out on shooter. Still managed to cut off the driver and keep the Agroids from getting the offensive rebound. Then went out on the shooter again.

Not a good idea for him to leave the guy open in the corner.

Good idea to get Codie into the game. 17-5 on the boards.

Pope dribbles off his foot.

Greatly disfavoring the team with the limited rotation.

We're only down 4 in a game in which we are being outrebounded 14-5. Without our two leading rebounders (Kaluma and Weaver), we're pitifully weak on the boards. I thought Kent was blasted by Payne on that first drive, but no call. He kind of went up weak the second time.

Larry doing a good job getting into the lane so far. Nice pull up by Pryor. A little late on the pass to Onyema on the next possession Nice inbound play.

Shedrick grabbed around the waist and tripped. No call.

Have either Shedrick or Kent gotten into the air while trying to rebound? They've usually been kind of tied up with Agroids, but I don't think either has gotten off the floor yet.

Broome "has a chance to play tonight," but his minutes will be limited. Lampkin had 12 rebounds for Syracuse when he went to the bench with a couple of minutes left in the first half. Syracuse up 33-32 at the half. SMU up 49-36 with 11:12 to go. South Carolina went 6 minutes without making a bucket. 13-10 MSU with 9:06 to go and shooting ft.

He spent most of the game against Mississippi foolishly driving into trouble.

Three games of interest for bubble watchers in the ACC. Both UNC and Pitt are on steep slides in the matrix. Pitt is on a four game losing streak in conference and plays @ Syracuse, which is still without Donnie Freeman and will be for some time because he still isn't putting weight on his injured leg. UNC hosts conference doormat Boston College. SMU is @ NC State. SMU is on the outside looking in but getting some votes in the matrix. I don't quite understand that because it hasn't been able to compete with the better teams in the conference (0-3, losing by a combined 67 points to Duke, Louisville, and UNC with 2 of the games at home). South Carolina, looking for its first conference win, hosts Mississippi State today. Bubble team Vandy hosts Kentucky. Georgia, coming off really tough losses to Auburn and @ Arky, heads to Florida. Pomeroy gives it the second lowest chance to win in the conference today, behind only LSU playing in Tuscaloosa. Mississippi tries to bounce back in Columbia against Missouri. Missouri is in a stretch of games in which it gets to prove if it is real or not. It is 3-0 at home in conference, but it hasn't played anyone better than Vandy or Arky there so fa in conference, eve if it did beat Kansas there in December. It plays Mississippi State, Tennessee, and A&M after today's game. Mississippi has three straight home games coming up (Texas, Kentucky, Auburn). Oklahoma goes to Arky in the only conference game that doesn't include at least one ranked team. Auburn hosts Tennessee. Auburn got a favorable schedule. Only one game each against Tennessee and Florida, and both are in Auburn. Ok, so it does have to play both Alabama and Mississippi twice.

A&M is neither a pretty offensive team nor a good one. It can't shoot 3s. It doesn't shoot 2s well. It masks its offensive deficiencies by being terrific at offensive rebounding and getting to the line, and those things can really mask deficiencies, but it makes the game ugly. You can also give A&M credit for having a low turnover percentage in conference play, but Mississippi forced A&M into 20 turnovers Wednesday night. Of course, that is the sort of thing Beard's, I mean Mark Adams's teams do. So, in sum, A&M wins by having a lot more chances to shoot than its opponents. In its two conference losses, A&M did not have the rebounding advantage. Oklahoma almost beat it, but that was a case of OU shooting lights out. What I remember most about the game @ Reed was that while we did a pretty good job of keeping A&M off of the offensive glass (not that it missed many shots from inside the arc), A&M so owned the paint in the second half that we lost by 20 on a night A&M shot about 10% from the arc. Shedrick and Kent were extremely timid on the few possessions they had the ball inside. Kaluma was on the bench in foul trouble when A&M went to a zone late in the first half and erased our early lead. It was a tighter zone than the one Syracuse played to be sure, but we made almost no effort to get the ball inside the zone for kickouts the way we did with Kaluma in Brooklyn. Pharrel Payne has been nearly unstoppable in conference--shooting 80% from the field and taking half again as many fta as fga. 50% career ft shooter, but 64% in conference this year.

Every time we had a coaching search, whether were replacing Barnes, Smart, or Beard, a lot of posters would always clamor for Calipari, and I couldn't find enough words each time to explain what a bad idea that would have been, but I always tried.

Some other things of note around the country-- Nebraska lost at home by 5 to USC, and Indiana lost by 9 @ Northwestern. Both were 11 seeds in the matrix going into the games. Neither is likely to be there this weekend. Indiana has suffered a bunch of really big losses, including by 25 at home to Illinois and by a combined 42 points in road games against Nebraska and Iowa, two teams currently on the wrong side of the bubble. And Indiana is just now going into the toughest part of its schedule. It is the underdog in the next 7 games. Woodson has his job cut out for him. He might have a little breathing room since he won a tournament game in 2023, but Indiana basketball has been spinning wheels since Crean's last S16 team in 2016. Nebraska is on a five game losing streak, including home losses to Rutgers and USC, both on the wrong side of the bubble right now, and a 36 point torching by Purdue. Utah may run out of patience with Craig Smith this year, since it is about to miss the tournament for the fourth straight year. Utah had a three game winning streak thanks to breather of home against OSU, @TCU, and home against BYU, but it was smothered last night by Houston 70-36. I guess Dawes is now in the state of Utah for good, but maybe Smith will be let go, and he'll look for a new home. Always nice to see a tall guy with perimeter skills who is willing to fight for rebounds. And a lot of the "news" yesterday was about Dan Hurley going off on the refs against Butler Tuesday in a "don't walk away from me, I'm the greatest coach in the history of the game" or some such rant, and him whining yesterday about how his is the only great team that ever had to deal with hostile refs on a nightly basis. Maybe Hurley thinks a school can't be the new Duke unless everyone hates it, too.

Ok, I have one more comment on basketball. Post-game press conference of winning coach

My final comment on college basketball tonight. It takes a network called "Vice" to run a series on Calipari and Pitino.

That offensive rebound and putback of the missed ft was by the shooter. Arky had no one in position to rebound. Georgia fell asleep there.

Genius play by Arky. Wagner drove, missed the pullup, but an Arky guy coming to get position for the rebound slid under a Georgia player to take him out of position to prevent other Arky player from coming in and getting the rebound. Newell had to foul. Arky ft. Made the first, missed the second, rebounded it and put it back. 3 point win for the squid.

Georgia got lucky there. Guard drove to ft line and froze. Lobbed to Newell before 5 second count could be made. Newell in position to do nothing, but he was bumped, and a foul was called. He hit both. Clutch ft shooting by the freshman center.

Arky converts. Georgia down 2 with 30 seconds to go.

Dumb lazy pass across perimeter by Georgia. Now Arky ball in a tie game.

Right, but when you compare one free throw to a -17 on rebounds, I think you are comparing an apple to several apple orchards.