Falcon Year In Review
I think for many of us, the Falcons exceeded expectations--at least those we had when Ron Lewis left in August. At the time, I feared a single digit win season. But Josh Almanson responded with an All-MAC season (never before had he averaged in double figures), and John Reimold proved to be a consistent scoring threat. As you know, I did pick a 17 win regular season, and that's where we ended up. A couple key plays in clutch situations, and we could have won the West.
Having said that, sometimes stats like that are an illusion. People can make up their own mind, but no empirical analysis of our performance would lead someone to think that we were anything other a middle MAC team. We shot well, but didn't score well, and we did some other things OK, but not great. If you show anyone these rankings with the teams removed, and they'd say, hey, that's about a .500 team in that conference. As we were.
So it goes. Let's look at how we fared in the MAC.
It will surprise no one we were 9th in scoring offense at 69.8. This is telling for a team that didn't lose any games when it scored more than 70.
It might surprise people to know that we were 7th in scoring defense (68.6). DD's reputation for lock-down defense simply doesn't bear out in numbers, for reasons we will explore, but primarily because we are a little slow. Our scoring margin was (+1.1).
As a team, we shot well. We were 2nd in FT% (.748), 1st in FG% (.488) and second in 3fg (.379).
There are some other stories inside that. For example, our 3FG is very good. But, we didn't really try very many (17/game), which is 12th in the conference. We made 6.4/game, which is 11th in the conference. So while we were accurate in 3FG, and didn't waste as many possessions with missed 3's as some teams, you could also argue that we didn't make as much of our 3FG as we could have. Had we shot more, we might have upped our scoring average. That depends on whether good shots were available, but on the other hand, they could have been created.
Put another way, we were 8th in 3FG% Defense. Teams only shot .354 against us. Still, we lost the battle of 3's 196-187. That's one point a game.
Because we shot so well, and other teams shot pretty well against us, there weren't as many rebounds to be had as normal. We wwere last in rebounding (31.1), but second in rebounds allowed (30.7), leaving us +.4, and sixth in the conference. We were dead last in offensive boards (8.76). Don't get me wrong--we weren't very good rebounders, but its probably not as bad as it seems because we did have a postiive margin.
We lead the league in assist with 16.83/game. I'll go on about this some other time, but assists is so subjective its almost useless. And this probably proves it.
I know there was a great deal of concern about our turnovers. Rightfully so. We were 9th in turnovers (15.0/game), with only Buffalo, EMU, and CMU (17.5) worse. We were also 9th in creating turnovers (13.6), and with a -1.38 margin, that's 12th in the conference.
As mentioned, we were also in the middle of the pack in scoring D. Teams shot .445 against us, which was also 7th, or about in the middle of the conference.
On the matter of fouls. The MAC doesn't keep this officially, but here is what is shows. The difference top to bottom isn't necessarily huge, but we were 11th with over 21 fouls a game. 19 was in the middle, and about 18 was really good. Bottom line, there is not much variance in our conference in fouls.
OU 17.8
WMU 17.9
Ball 18.3
KS 18.4
NIU 18.5
Akron 18.8
Marsh. 19.3
EMU 19.4
Miami 19.4
UT 20.4
BG 21.3
Buff 21.5
CMU 22.0
If you are curious, the MAC also doesn't publish individual foul leaders, but here they are.
1 Bowler 3.97
2 Williams 3.22
3 Patton 3.21
4 Harbut 3.13
5 Anderson 3.11
6 Wright 3.10
7 St. Clair 3.10
8 Jordan 3.09
9 Rost 3.03
10 Warzyinski 3.00
Our opponents shot 658 FTs, and we only shot 535. Even allowing for a higher shooting percentage, we were 56 FTS behind (456-400) for the season. That's about two points for each game on a team that only outscored its opposition by one point.
We were 12th in the MAC in attendance (2452/game). Only CMU (2,263) was worse. BSU led with a 5,641 average.
We'll compare this to the year before, but there isn't much different. What was different this year was that we had two team-oriented scorers coming to the fore, and not fighting Ron Lewis for shots.
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