Oh Well…

When Coolio shot that ball with about 50 seconds left on the clock, I was relieved.  I actually vocally let out a “Yessss!” because Derrick Brown had a hand in his face, he was just about at NBA-range, and someone obviously replaced the regulation-sized rims with smaller ones for the second half.  I mean, no one was hitting anything for either team.  There was NO WAY that ball was going in, yeah?

Oh well…

It was one hell of a shot.  And then it was one hell of a defensive play.  Add one more cliched “what-if” for X fans with D Brown just barely stepping out of bounds after a defensive stop whislt up by 2 with 1:30 left to play.  But it happened,  and Pitt took advantage of a mistake when it mattered the most.  They won, they deserved to win, and they deserve their very first Elite Eight appearance, because Greg Oden didn’t push anyone into the third row right before it happened. 

Despite what EVERYONE but X fans said it would be, this was a very evenly-matched game.  Both teams played tremendous defense.  Kenny Frease’s defense appeared to have improved ten-fold and is enough to get me already thinking about October.  Part of me wished Coach gave him more minutes in the second half just to get that big Massilon-bred body of his in front of Blair, who appeared to just steam-roll through whoever had position on him for something like 107 rebounds I think it was. 

Speaking of the second half, why did we have to have a half time last night?  We would have won by 20 if we skipped that nonsensical break after 20 minutes.  That was the sexiest defense I have ever seen.  Stupid dumb basketball rules… I mean as soon as the new 20 minutes began, the Muskies forgot how to hold onto the ball and we began seeing the silly turnovers that was there for a lot of this season.  Combine that and the ball just not going in for about 8 minutes and the momentum was officially out the effing window.

The thing about this game that bugs me is that even with the lack of offensive execution, X still could have won.  It was ours to lose.  Personally, I blame the economy.

Anysway, my heart goes out to our BJ and CJ.  These guys were on a mission in the first half of this game, willing us to a comfortable lead at the break.  It’s always tough to see your seniors go out in their last effort, but thus is the life of a college basketball fan… unless your an Ohio State fan (which probably means you didn’t go there).  Then you just watch your underachieving 7 footers leave EVERY year. 

Well, I lost about 5-6 years of my life watching this game.  My heart was lifted and then dropped like those ridiculous rides at amusement parks that I do not go on.  I lost more hair and I flipped off some old guys who were mockingly cheering for Pitt because myself and the other X fans were cheering so loudly for our boys (classy, I know).  But this was another great experience for Xavier, and there are many positive things to come away with after this season.

I just really wanted to post this picture.

Who would have thought we were going to make it this far and have a great chance to beat the no. 1 seed in the third round?  What that says to me is that we can now all EXPECT this team to be there every year.  And what that also means is that we undoubtedly  have one of the best coaching staffs in the NCAA, PERIOD.  Making the tournament was all we asked from this team.  They got us another A10 Championship, earned a 4 seed to the dance, and made it into the Sweet Sixteen again.  XU will never be Cinderella again.  Not with the formula we have.  We are all witnessing this program advance to another level before our very eyes.  We are obviously not among the very elite of the field, but we are not that far behind.  There are many in our rear view mirrors, and they are getting further behind. 

So here’s to the best program in Ohio.  I can’t wait to dance next year. 

Sweet… Pitt it is.

XU has advanced to their second straight Sweet Sixteen appearance for the first time ever to face off against Coach Miller’s Alma Mater Pittsburgh,  and I couldn’t be drunker happier.  The general discussion with Mr. Golfitup and I before the game was that this was going to be one of those first-to-sixty games, and this was exactly the case as XU won 60-49.

Xavier was the team to reach it first, and they did so with suffocating defense on the other end.  There was spread out scoring (signature Sean Miller coaching), big-time plays from just about everybody (except for Brad Redford’s 7-minute One Trillion), and did I mention The Muskies played with suffocating defense?  Well they did.  Wisconsin only shot 3-20 behind the 3-point arc, and only shot 28% total from the field. The biggest defensive play to me was a HUGE block by Kenny Frease all the way out to the 3-point line with about 7 minutes left.  He extended out to a guard and threw a shot back that could have tied this game, where every point was so important until X was finally able to pull away with 2 or 3 minutes to go.  But that isn’t meant to take anything away from the D the rest of the team played.  It was a thing of beauty.

Dante was a pain im the Badger Ass, Jamel’s 18 minutes included some of the biggest momentum plays of the game, Kenny had his best all-around game despite still strugling from the free throw line, and I drank Budweiser.  The thing that shocks me is that some things that I thought would be our Achilles  Heel in the tournament, especially in a back-and-forth close game like this did not spell our demise.

The Badgers shot about 13% better than us from the line with the help of some odd foul calls in the first half, and they only had 7 TO’s compared to our 14.  But it seemed as if every Wisconsin possession went down to the last 3 seconds of the shot clock before a bad shot was forced up or, you know, the occasional make.  Their epically slow style just appeared to fall right into the pack-line trap as they could hardly get anything by us,  and our Muskies had just a little more than enough offense to advance to the Sweet 16… again, bitches.

Now I get to nervously watch another huge game on Thursday, but until then, I will celebrate.  And I wonder how many times we will get to see this until and during our game against Pitt.  SEND IT IN JAMEL!!!

***also, did anyone else notice D Brown in the post-game interview say that they weren’t going to let CJ and BJ play their last games?  As in this wouldnt have been his last anyways?  I liked the way that sounded…

Ugh

No blood, no foul I guess…

Well, for all those Musketeer fans who think we are too good for the A10,  XU is in the midst of their second losing streak of the season while falling to third in the Atlantic 10 standings behind St. Joe’s and Dayton.  And all the Keystone Light in the world cannot wash out the taste of the loss in Dayton last night.

 I gave our squad somewhat of a pass for the Duquesne game, because who knew the Dukes would shoot the lights out as they did?  But my glass was half-full, and I assumed our boys would bounce back and play their hearts out in the I75 battle.  But this was obviously not the case.

Things that grind my gears:

-Poor free throw shooting continues to be a visibly large flaw with this team.  When we are down in the second half I cringe when CJ Anderson draws a foul.  9-17 as a team.

-We don’t have a point guard.  We may have been spoiled watching Drew Lavender do work, but it is tough not to have a guy who can open up some offense with the ball in his hand.  Turnovers were actually down with only 5 between our two PGs.  Usually one of them has at least that many themselves.  Tutu had 0 assists and 0 points.  Dante had 3 points with no made field goals and only 1 assist.  When you aren’t a strong ball-handling PG (which is, ya know, 90% of being a point guard), you better have some kind of scoring ability.  Drew needs to come back and teach those guys the teardrop, because I cannot bear to watch them drive into a center/forward and get blocked anymore.

- I don’t understand what happened to our defense… The Dick Bennett “Pack-Line” Defense appeared to work well early in the year against the likes of Memphis who plays the dribble-drive style 40 minutes a game.  But Dayton’s guards seemed to drive passed everyone in blue with ease for an uncontested layup.  With our style of defense, we need not pressure the ball at the half-court line.  Especially against fleet-of-foot ball handlers. 

-Dayton’s defense was relentless.  Bradley couldn’t shake his defender to save his soul, but being the quick-shooter that he is, he still went 2-3 behind the arc.  I do feel like the charges they were drawing weren’t getting called for us, but I’m not about to whine about refs here…anymore at least.

-How effing annoying was that poor video feed due to the windy weather?  It made this game even harder to watch. 

-I am officially worried that the 7,084-year winning streak over UD in Cincy is in jeapordy.  Dayton will want that one just as much as the one they dominantly took last night.

-Teams are doing their homework on XU.  They are pressuring the bajeezuz out of anyone who touches the ball.  Cut it ouuuuuut.

Our favorite collegiate basketball team will limp back to Cincinnati with tails between legs to take on the FU Rams who are a solid 3-18.  The D- performance from last night would be enough to defeat the Rams, but lets hope for at least a C+…

Ugh.

How to Lose

Lots of dumb turnovers + missing free throws= loss to Duquesne

Hey Everybody! X is 17-2 and ranked 10th in the country!

HA! Sean is a happy camper!

Beating LSU on the road was a huge win for the Muskies. Should be a big confidence boost for the boys in navy. As an aside, should we fans push to havethe boys wear the navy blue unis at home? I love our road unis and it would make us different by wearing em at home. And I always like being different.

But anyways, going into Baton Rouge was always going to be a tricky proposition as LSU was hungry to get that “signature” win on their NCAA tournament resume. Plus, it came at an odd time of the year since both teams were already ankle deep in conference action. But our boy’s showed a lot of toughness and resolve in gutting out a ten point win.

The story for me was the down low play of Kenny Frease and Jason Love. They combined to go 10-13 from the field with 22 points and 11 ball-boards. Although I’d be very remiss not to mention Derrick Brown’s continued stellar play. Scoring 22 points on 7-11 shooting including 3-4 from with the three ball to go along with 9 rebounds is stellar play in my book. When D Brown hits that three ball it’s a thing of beauty. High-arcing shots are just prettier to watch go through that net.

Once again, the A-10 becomes our top priority. We’re 5-0 in the league coming into Wednesday night’s game against Charlotte at the beautiful Cintas Center. Definitely are in the driver’s seat but also St. Joes’s has yet to lose a game and Dayton, Richmond and Temple all have just one loss.

But I want to take this space to say just how stupid some of the message board talk has been of late in regards to the A-10. To say that the A-10 is holding us back is down right ludicrous. Both of today’s polls have us at #10 in the country. I mean, how far back can it really be holding us? If a team like Gonzaga can make it up to 4th in the polls when they come from a decidedly lesser conference than the A-10, then what is all the bitching about?

I mean seriously, woe is us. We are 5-0 in the conference and clearly have the best team. But that doesn’t mean we’ll win every game. UD, Temple, URI, and St. Joe’s all have enough talent to beat us and maybe even a couple others on the right day. But do they have enough talent to beat us over a 16 game conference schedule? I highly doubt it.

And of course I want the conference to get better, but it’s not like Xavier can do anything about it. All we can do is keep winning. Just remember, GW went 16-0 in the conference a scant three seasons ago and now look at em. Obviously, I’m not saying that is going to happen to us, cuz I don’t think it will, but just realize it doesn’t take a whole lot of time for things to turn south and in a hurry.

We are in an incredibly good spot right now. The past 15 years has seen a decidedly upward motion for Xavier basketball and that coincides directly with our affiliation with the A-10 conference. And it’s not like other conferences are chomping at the bit to get us to come to their side. So let’s calm down people. We’ve been a game away from the final four twice in the past five years. I can think of more than a few schools who would like have that distinction….

XU improves to 4-0 in the Atlantic 10, still needs to improve

At least he can put this one in…

 

The Xavier Men’s Basketball Team was favored to beat the La Salle Explorers by 12 and won by 20, but shot just 52.8% from the free throw line and still had 15 turnovers (a significant improvement from the 22 TO’s against Rhody).  Without Jason Love’s effort from the charity stripe (a perfect 8-8), the team shot a whopping 39.2%, which is a huge embarrassing failure.  Good to see the Sean Miller Free Throw Club is paying off… Hopefully we will see a Jason Love-like improvement with Kenny and Jamal at the line, as Love only shot 56% in his first two seasons and is now one of our best.  I know its easy to complain about poor free throw shooting, but for a team that gets to the line as much as we do (2nd in the country up until before yesterday’s game with about 30 attempts per game) missing that many only means we are giving the ball right back.  And we do that enough as it is.

But I don’t want to be a total downer, we did still manage to win by 20 despite the above complaint worthy statistics, Bradley looks to be nice and cozy in his role on the team, the rebounding was there, I didn’t want to kill any referees, The Musketeers outshot their opponents 52% to 41%, and even Joe Hughes got him some.  And with that, I do believe I have summed up about all that I could possibly have taken from that game.

We will be partaking in a short Q&A with the Bonnies Basketball Blog sometime before the game where we will discuss the upcoming matchup.  Apparently, the Bonnies found a good player from Canada that isn’t Steve Nash to play fior them.  So this should be interesting. 

Seacrest out.

X off to good A-10 start

Which is more than I can say about our not so friendly neighbors up I-75…

This Fordham win was a perfect preview for the rest of our A-10 road schedule.  X is going to get everyone’s best shot on the road.  Both the fans and players will be up for it and it is a great test mentally for the guys wearing navy blue.  That’s why it was probably a good thing to start off against the weakest link of the A-10.  Rose Hill Gym is the oldest gym in use by a D-1 basketball team.  

Naturally, that makes for an odd atmosphere.  Our guys probably weren’t used to hearing everything going on in the gym.  But when you out rebound your opponent by 23 that usually makes for an easy win.

Teams with small gyms like that can have a good home court advantage.  I watched St. Mary’s play at home against Santa Clara recently and they have a very small gym as well.  But the difference was that the place was packed and the fans are right on top of you, which can make for an intimidating atmosphere.   But when your team is 2-11 I suppose it’s tough to really get up and be excited even it the 16th ranked team in the country comes to town.

Rhody will have that aforementioned atmosphere in place Thursday night in that the students will be rocking and their place is more like the Cintas Center than a high school gym like Fordham’s.  Rhode Island should have beaten Duke early this year, but succumbed late at Cameron Indoor.  Obviously, we did not do too well against Duke but that won’t have any bearing on this game.  But we’ll worry about Rhody later this week.  Right now, let’s just be thankful for the 415,323th time we aren’t our neighbors to the north.

We are already half way done with the regular season. sigh…….   Oh well, the more games we play the sooner March (and April!) gets here so I’ll take it.

Let’s go X!

My trip to Virginia

One of my cousin’s just happens to live in Charlottesville, VA.  Naturally I just had to make the 8 hour drive down to Virginia to watch my Muskies play as well.  Add in a tour of Monticello for this history buff and it’s a 16 hour round trip well worth taking.  Plus, I kinda like my cousin as well and it was great to see her.

Charlottesville is a town chalk full of history with the obvious focal point being Monticello.  Thomas Jefferson will forever be linked to the town as he is also the founder of the University of Virginia.  But I was unaware two other presidents also made the Charlottesville area their home as well in James Madison and James Monroe.  Meriwether Lewis, better known for being half of the exploration duo Lewis and Clark, also called Charlottesville home.  More recently, these guys also formed in this small town in Virginia.

Representing in Monticello’s backyard….

Me right outside Thomas Jefferson’s grave couple hours before game time.

John Paul Jones Arena is only a couple years old and it shows.  The place was spectacular in my opinion.  The brick finish fit right in with the rest of campus.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

The inside was very nice, clean and mostly uncomplicated as well.  Here’s a picture I took from our seats.  They didn’t feel as high up as the picture below would seem to indicate.  

Got there a bit early as you can see…

I was a bit disappointed in the Wahoo crowd.  The place might be a bit too big for the school’s fan base.  Not so much because they don’t have the fans, but because of Charlottesville’s location.  It’s a pretty small town in the middle of no where.  A 14,000 seat capacity is probably a bit too much to ask for consistent sell-outs throughout the season.  Of course, it didn’t help that the student section was far from full capacity as most were still on break for the holidays.

As for the game itself, I doubt you need me to go over much, but I thought we played really good defense throughout sans the final 5 minutes.  I feel bad for Walsh, but it is perhaps his absence that has allowed Brad Redford to begin to show his outrageous shooting ability and get into a groove courtesy of those few extra minutes he is now getting (thanks Shawn).  

After two tough losses it is great to see the team get back to their winning ways and round into shape just in time for conference season to start up this Thursday at home in the beautiful Cintas Center.

Let’s go X!

F

 

Tonight was a complete and utter failure. The X-Men could not get passed Butler’s D, didn’t man up on the other side of the floor without fouling (24 fouls), gave up way too many points off turnovers, missed free throws, and just didn’t step up and play with anything resembling confidence besides D Brown knocking down 3’s (perhaps the only good sign from the last 2 games).

The refs were pathetic. But, I refuse to place blame on them alone. They may have called 24 on us, but they called 18 on the Butler Generic Nicknames. So, when refs can’t stop blowing (their whistles), you have to take advantage of that and knock down throws. That is why we were able to win 30 games last year. We made the easy ones. Butler won this one with their quality free throw shooting. 78.8% vs. our 54.4%. Pathetic.

The D needs to improve as well. Every time our guards were beat off the dribble, they followed them to the hole where one of our bigs would pick up the ball-handler, leaving a wide open 3 point shooter. I wanted to see guys like Brad a Tutu fall back and rely on Brown and Love to pick that guy up and go cover the open shooter. That would have been better than, you know, nothing.

At least the offense looked good… Oh wait, no it didn’t. At first it appeared that Kenny would be able to dominate down low, but that didn’t last. He finished with a perfect 4 of 4 from the field, but it seemed to take place within a minute and thirty seconds, and then it fell into the black hole that apparently sucked up our will to win.

I would be upset with Coach’s T, but if I was in his place I would have racked up at least 30 techs myself. UGH, I will be hearing those whistles in my sleep.

That is all for now. I urge the poll voters to ignore XU, because they definitely don’t belong in the top 25.

Sean Miller’s post-game radio comments live-blog

I want to see what the mind-set of Coach and the team is right now.  Obviously, it will not be good and I don’t anticipate Sean sugar coating anything…

Sadly, it’s almost a moral victory that we lost by 18.  And it doesn’t matter that we outscored them in the second half.  Anyone who doesn’t think Duke let off the gas a little bit is insane.  Plus, I’m sure Coach laid down the gauntlet at half time.

Byron, (and I’m paraphrasing, actually just know that I’m paraphrasing everything from here on out…) “Can’t dwell on this too long.”

Coach is here…..

“Give Duke a lot of credit.  Scheyer and Henderson shot the ball incredibly well.  Lucky to only lost by 18.  By far the superior team and could have lost by 30.”

“Easy to say we weren’t ready.  Butler and Duke are the top two rated teams on our schedule right now.”

“Try to take it one 4 minute war at a time.  The first two segments we’re down by 20 minutes and its inescapable to not feel that way.  Able to get by us at every position from an on the ball standpoint.  Duke could easily be a final four team.”

Byron, “thought D Brown came out in second half.”

Coach, “Liked the way D Brown came out for second half.  Jason brought his lunch pail today.  Tutu needs to realize he can’t drive on anyone.  Lesson learned for everyone today.  Find out about everyone in this type of situation.  Taking lose against an opponent like this means we have a lot of lessons learned.”

Byron, “Did finals play a part in this?”

Coach, “Had all week to work, had  good practices this week, credit Duke, they are in a different category today than they have been all year.”

Byron felt Sean wasn’t too disappointed considering what happened.  Time to refocus, gotta travel and then practice come Monday.  Basically a 48 hour turnaround before Butler come Tuesday.

I’ll be in the beautiful Cintas Center Tuesday night.  It better be a packed house cuz the Muskies need us more than ever.  Like Byron said, right now Butler is the second best team on paper we will play this year.  So come on Muskie fans, let’s pack the Cintas Center and give the support our players need now more than ever!

Let’s go X!