Basketball

Baylor Drops Heartbreaker to South Carolina 85-84

By chris ⋅ January 3, 2009 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

What a disappointing loss this one was…  With Dunn seeing major foul trouble (that official was smoking crack, btw) and only putting in 9 points (6 on FTs), Baylor wasn’t able to outscore a hot SC team.  Jerrells put in 22 points, Carter scored 18, and Dugat scored 16 points, but they needed 45 shot attempts to score those 56 points.  Rogers had a double-double with 14 points and 13 rebounds, but offense wasn’t really the problem on the night.

Baylor allowed South Carolina to score 85 points on 54% shooting (57.1% on 3s) which is just an insane rate.  Only one player did not shoot 50% or better for South Carolina (Mitchell Carter was 0-1 in his 1 minute of playing time), so it’s not like one person was just tearing it up.

While this was a close game, it was far more disappointing to me than the UTA or Hartford games that were closer than they should have been.  We just did not play good enough defense by any stretch of imagination.  This team has too many talented seniors to let a team come into our house and score 85 points on them.  Especially a team that is not considered a conference championship challenger.

Why Baylor Lost:
Baylor chose not to play defense and wasn’t able to slow down any one player for South Carolina.  That’s really it.  You can gripe about only shooting ~70% on free throws or having Dunn in foul trouble, but we took more free throws than South Carolina did, and they shot less than 50% on their attempts.  Our guards weren’t the problem on the offensive end, so there’s not much arguing that Dunn would have significantly exceeded either Carter or Dugat’s 18 or 16 point performances.  We lost on the defensive end of the floor.

Player of the Game:
Curtis Jerrells, Tweety Carter, and Henry Dugat share in this honor, but they should also share in the responsibility of allowing Downey to shoot better than 50% on 19 attempts and score 23 points.

Who’s Up Next:
Texas Tech is coming in Saturday to start conference play before we head out on the road to face Texas A&M.  Tech has shown the ability to score points on people, but they drop games against some bad teams like Lamar and UTEP.  This should definitely be a win, but if we play defense against Tech like we did against South Carolina, we will be in a dogfight.