Reality BITES!

BARF! You know what happens when you piss off your fan base? You get just enough rope to hang yourself. I wish we played terrible tonight, I wish I could point to some anomaly to justify losing to one of the worst teams in the conference (dead last in RPI before beating us) but, they were just better than us. A team with ZERO wins against the top 200 game-planned us, out-coached us and outplayed us. We had more rebounds, we shot 50% but, they knew our Achilles heal. We won't play zone and we have no point guard. They went right at Jordan with quicker, smaller players and we refused to move into a zone to protect him. This against a team who is terrible from the 3 point line.

This is a team 100% dependent on defense, I expected Tulane to score around 50. This is what happens when you have no offense, you can lose to anyone. We saw the positive against Memphis, Illinois and A&M in that, even against teams with superior talent, our defense minded, grind it out team, can compete and even win. The reverse of that however, is that just about ANY team can hang with you and beat you. What does that make you? Always approaching average, which, post JP would have been an improvement but is that acceptable now?

The biggest cause for concern is that we look like a poorly coached team down the stretches of these games. Illinois, Ohio, Mizz St, BYU, Memphis and now Tulane are all games where our staff looked clueless the last 5-8 minutes. I give all credit for USM, that was solid but yikes, you could make a "what not to do" tape from the calamity of coaching errors from those other games. Some of it is coaching 101 stuff.

Talent-wise, we are not bad but there is a STEEP fall-off, can you imagine this team with no Uzoh or Jordan? Not only do we need to replace them, we need a couple other studs to get back to NCAA caliber. Sobering isn't it. It makes you realize how very far away we actually are. BARF!

UTEP gave UAB all they could handle tonight on the road, they are going to be fired up and ready to play. They will play 10 guys and they will come at Jordan. They dont have great big men but they have some size. We will have to shoot very well and play much better defense than tonight.

C-USA is now a clusterfudge. I dont see us having much chance at second but we could still finish anywhere from 2nd to 6th. One thing is now crystal clear though, no NCAA unless we win the CUSA tourny. It is great to practically eliminate yourself in mid-January, way to fire up the fanbase.