Everyone has talked about bad offense. The other team came in shooting 20.5% from three and tonight they shot 44.4% against us. We put them on the line 28 times, and they hit 22 free throws (they came in shooting 74%). We didn't control the tempo, we didn't make them play our game-- we tried to play their game, the one they play in practice and on white boards, and they're better at playing their game than we are.
Maybe the SIU people were right that we'd fall apart as a program after Mullins left, because we're giving away games on defense.
In my glee after going to the Final Four, I recounted The Dark Years of Loyola basketball in several articles. I recounted the mismanagement, embarrassment, and incompetence that dragged us down from a prominent program to floating along the bottom of the Horizon League with Valpo and Wright State and UW-Milwaukee mocking us, suggesting that we get out of the conference as some kind of gracious gesture to help them by ridding the conference of an itinerant loser.
I wrote those articles because I thought we were well past the point when we would do embarrasing, incompetent, and inexcusable things like lose to Coppin State. Surely THAT kind of thing would never happen again.....
Nope!
Take care of the ball, play defense and control the tempo on both sides of the ball. We have enough talent to win 65% of games if we focus on that. The focus on defense makes offense come much more naturally and in flow, especially for newcomers to the college game.
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