Men's Hoops, Done....

Last week I was a little premature in declaring the season over...so, now, unless the website collegeoutsiders.com starts a tournament, it's over.

Oakland smoked BG last night.  The game was competitive most of the way, and BG was only down 5 with about 8 minutes left. It was 61-56 at that point, and then Oakland scored 25 points in 8 minutes and held BG to 13 and the Grizz ended up with a 17 point win.  At the end, Oakland was scoring at will, and the Falcons had clearly been beaten.

It was the kind of game that was expected.  There were only 65 possessions, which is BG's average pace for the season, but Oakland scored 1.32 points per possession, well above even their average, and BG's worst defensive game of the season and worst since Akron hung 89 on the Falcons last year.  Oakland shot 48% overall, made 50% of their threes (12 in total), rebounded 40% of their own missed shots, shot 7 more free throws and only had 9 turnovers.

BG had a nice offensive game, though they were playing against one of the worst defensive teams in D1.  At 1.06 points per possession, they were a little bit above their season average, but not great and obviously not enough to keep up with an Oakland team scoring at will for 8 minutes.  BG was 3 of 20 from beyond the arc

College Basketball Stats

Jordon Crawford did have 21 points, shot 54% and had 5 assists over 3 turnovers.  Calhoun had 15 and 7 and shot 58%.  Scott Thomas finished his career with a very Scott Thomas line--11 points, 6 rebounds and 6 assists over 1 turnover.  Dee Brown had 10 points in 12 minutes in his final game, and Oglesby played only 13 minutes.

BG seemed to be trying to spread some minutes around.  James Erger played 17 minutes and Orr played 8.

For the Grizz, Reggie Hamilton, the nation's leading scorer at 25 points a game, went all CRAZY on BG, with 37 points on 63% shooting, and 14-15 from the free throw line.  He added 5 assists.  Travis Bader also scored 21 for Oakland.  Hamilton's scoring is the most against BG (according to Todd Walker) since the last time we played Oakland and one of their guys scored 31.  (To be clear, Todd Walker knew who it was, I just don't remember).

Anyway, the other ramification of this is that BG did not, in fact, have its third winning season since the West Virginia Incident.  They finish right at .500, so that's two winning seasons and one .500 season in the 10 years since "it" happened.

Anyway, there will be lots more time to rehash how this all went.  UT heads up to Oakland Saturday hosts Robert Morris Saturday to continue the tournament.