A "good loss"?
Posted: Fri Feb 06, 2009 12:51 pmLet's all say it together: no loss is a good loss.
With that out of the way, though, I'd say last night's loss at Southern Miss was about as good a loss as a team can have... and I think we needed to lose. We weren't going to run the table, anyway, and it's not like we have dominant talent. But we had won a few games we easily could have lost, and with a young team, that can be great news or very dangerous.
For those who watched it on TV, you saw what I saw - with the exception of a stretch toward the end of the first half, we were basically awful. But we still came back and made a run at the supposed preseason favorites in the conference. In their gym. With their hand-picked refs. (I generally don't blame refs, because we get some calls at home, too, but last night was shameless.)
Brittany Gilliam couldn't buy a bucket until there were about 5 minutes left. Delisha Wills got gang-tackled a couple of times as they doubled her all the time. Jillian Samuels drained a couple of 3s, and they started rotating their defense more - apparently they remembered her lighting them up last year. We got very little from Christine Elliott, and even less from LaLa, Haley and the rest of the bench.
All year, I've been waiting for this kind of game. This team is too young to run the table, and would have been primed for a faceplant in the conference tournament if it had continued. This loss sucked, as all losses do, but we can rebound from it. Maybe we need to get angry, because we've lacked a little fire lately.
Flying to Orlando tonight. Playing 18 holes in the morning and then headed to the game. It will be interesting to see how we respond.
BEAT UCF!
With that out of the way, though, I'd say last night's loss at Southern Miss was about as good a loss as a team can have... and I think we needed to lose. We weren't going to run the table, anyway, and it's not like we have dominant talent. But we had won a few games we easily could have lost, and with a young team, that can be great news or very dangerous.
For those who watched it on TV, you saw what I saw - with the exception of a stretch toward the end of the first half, we were basically awful. But we still came back and made a run at the supposed preseason favorites in the conference. In their gym. With their hand-picked refs. (I generally don't blame refs, because we get some calls at home, too, but last night was shameless.)
Brittany Gilliam couldn't buy a bucket until there were about 5 minutes left. Delisha Wills got gang-tackled a couple of times as they doubled her all the time. Jillian Samuels drained a couple of 3s, and they started rotating their defense more - apparently they remembered her lighting them up last year. We got very little from Christine Elliott, and even less from LaLa, Haley and the rest of the bench.
All year, I've been waiting for this kind of game. This team is too young to run the table, and would have been primed for a faceplant in the conference tournament if it had continued. This loss sucked, as all losses do, but we can rebound from it. Maybe we need to get angry, because we've lacked a little fire lately.
Flying to Orlando tonight. Playing 18 holes in the morning and then headed to the game. It will be interesting to see how we respond.
BEAT UCF!
