Ay-Ziggy-Zoomba.com

Game is pretty close at the moment. Oakland leads 46-45.

Per Yahoo! Sports this one was tied at half 0-0. Big second half offensive explosion. I'm gonna take a flier here and guess that's incorrect.

BG about to lose here to Oakland for the 2nd or 3rd time in who knows how many years. This Oakland team got beat by Xavier by 15+. , but did play MSU close. I think we've got a long , long way to go to be real competitive for any Mac titles or sniffing the NCAA's. We may not see a BG team that can compete for these things until Orr can get his recruits in here. Right now Orr is making do with basically one recruit of his and a bunch of DD's filling out the roster. 2 years from now we should really see something.

Oakland put it away with 3 min. to go in the game. Final 90-80

Polk again had two fouls in his first 30 seconds of play. Oakland had big men that knew how to rebound and score. We have guys that kind of just look around. Are we recruiting big men?

It seemed like we were called for a foul almost every possesion. The team just doesn't look good at all. There are moments when you think they can get something good going then they turn the ball over ruining any momentum that was established.

Tricky_Falcon wrote:Oakland put it away with 3 min. to go in the game. Final 90-80

Polk again had two fouls in his first 30 seconds of play. Oakland had big men that knew how to rebound and score. We have guys that kind of just look around. Are we recruiting big men?

It seemed like we were called for a foul almost every possesion. The team just doesn't look good at all. There are moments when you think they can get something good going then they turn the ball over ruining any momentum that was established.

Orr certainly needs to recruit some big men for this team to be really competitive with these top mid-major teams. Oakland has a nice collection of big guys with size and athleticism. We're good and athletic enough to take care of teams like Furman but not the elite of mid-majors.

Falconboy wrote:

Tricky_Falcon wrote:Oakland put it away with 3 min. to go in the game. Final 90-80

Polk again had two fouls in his first 30 seconds of play. Oakland had big men that knew how to rebound and score. We have guys that kind of just look around. Are we recruiting big men?

It seemed like we were called for a foul almost every possesion. The team just doesn't look good at all. There are moments when you think they can get something good going then they turn the ball over ruining any momentum that was established.

Orr certainly needs to recruit some big men for this team to be really competitive with these top mid-major teams. Oakland has a nice collection of big guys with size and athleticism. We're good and athletic enough to take care of teams like Furman but not the elite of mid-majors.

We currently have two very capable big men in Polk and Larsen, Orr doesn't need to recruit any big men, he needs to coach these guys up. I think you will see continued improvement from these two players, I just hope it is sooner rather than later.

Dayons_Den wrote:

Falconboy wrote:

Tricky_Falcon wrote:Oakland put it away with 3 min. to go in the game. Final 90-80

Polk again had two fouls in his first 30 seconds of play. Oakland had big men that knew how to rebound and score. We have guys that kind of just look around. Are we recruiting big men?

It seemed like we were called for a foul almost every possesion. The team just doesn't look good at all. There are moments when you think they can get something good going then they turn the ball over ruining any momentum that was established.

Orr certainly needs to recruit some big men for this team to be really competitive with these top mid-major teams. Oakland has a nice collection of big guys with size and athleticism. We're good and athletic enough to take care of teams like Furman but not the elite of mid-majors.

We currently have two very capable big men in Polk and Larsen, Orr doesn't need to recruit any big men, he needs to coach these guys up. I think you will see continued improvement from these two players, I just hope it is sooner rather than later.

Well then, If Orr can coach Larson and OP up then we'd better see major improvement by the end of this season and into next when they are both Jr's. Odd as it seems Larson might have the better upside. But I guess we'll see, I'm not expecting much this year. It certainly hurts to not have Marschall as well.

I've only seen this team play live once this year and that was today. I listened to the other games. I realize both big men are sophomores but Polk has really been a non-factor who fouls way too much. Larson has upside. It would be nice to have a low post presence. Polk and Larson combined had 4 pts., 5 rebounds and 7 fouls today. The guards can only do so much. One thing I see is that all of our players defensively are slow to get into position and everyone wants to block a shot. Oakland could have drawn even more fouls than the 23 it did. The team jumps on every head fake and every shot attempt.

What also hurts is that Knight only had 3 boards in 30 minutes of play. He has the ability to average 3 times that many.

We only had 20 boards as a team today.

Polk had 4 fouls in 8 minutes. That is beyond ridiculous. If he can't straighten this out by the end of the season, he should reconsider whether basketball is a good use of his time. At this point, he's looking like a waste of a scholarship.

Can anyone say Erik Marschall?

cowboyjoe wrote:Can anyone say Erik Marschall?

Well I kinda just did in an above post.

Tricky_Falcon wrote:Oakland put it away with 3 min. to go in the game. Final 90-80

Polk again had two fouls in his first 30 seconds of play. Oakland had big men that knew how to rebound and score. We have guys that kind of just look around. Are we recruiting big men?

It seemed like we were called for a foul almost every possesion. The team just doesn't look good at all. There are moments when you think they can get something good going then they turn the ball over ruining any momentum that was established.

I was at the game yesterday as well, and I'm not sure what you were watching?

I agree fully that Polk & Larsen both played very poorly. No argument could be made there. I'm not sure where you got that Oakland's big men were knowing how to score/rebound? Their big guys that played didn't do anything all game long, really. The two guys that started the game contributed next to nothing, and one of them fouled out. Their big guys off the bench contributed a little, but not that much. Their leading rebounder was that 6'5 or so Nelson kid. He looked good rebounding but couldn't shoot to save his life.

Our big guys did not cost us this game. 3 things cost us this game: Turnovers, rebounding, and inability to defend. Specifically our guards (Jakubowski most of the time) could flat out not match the quickness of their PG, Jones. That kid just tore us up in the 2nd half. Oakland shot like 66.7% in the 2nd half, and I'm honestly not sure if they ever took a contested shot in the entire half. Our inability to defend the PG killed us. In typical BG fashion our big guys attempt to block every shot and are never in position for a rebound because of it.

Then to top it off every time we'd get it back tied, or within a basket we'd turn the freaking ball over. Hamblet was absolutely TERRIBLE handling the ball today. Miller & Jakubowski seemed that they wanted to try and keep up with the turnovers that Hamblet was putting up. Looking at the box score Miller & Hamblet both had 4 TOs, Jaku only 2. Still the team combined for 18 which is quite awful, and much worse than our average.

Our big men played poorly but most of their fouls were helping out after our perimeter players got torched. If we could actually defend against those quick guards it'd go a long way towards keeping the bigs out of foul trouble.

Personally, I didn't see this game as any grave indication of our team. We were able to get our shots we wanted (when we weren't turning it over), and we seemed to hit those shots most times. This was a case of us still not being able to matchup with a good guard & our lack of rebounding. We've pretty much had these problems for 5 years, and you cannot expect 6 months with a new coach to change that, unfortunately. We need to get our bigs to stop attempting to block every shot, and we need to get some decent guards. Until that happens we'll continue to struggle, like we did today.

At the end of the day however, if we cut our turnovers down to our season average we're probably right in this one till the end. From what I've seen so far this year, yesterday's turnover fest was an aberration. So long as that doesn't become a trend, I still think this is an average MAC team.