More on Fordham

The rather tumultuous situation at Fordham is being watched carefully by this excellent blog from over there.  The interim coach is trying to get Fontan back into the fold.

Fordham Preview

The Falcons are in New York as I write this, preparing to head over to the Bronx to take on the Fordham Rams.  They arrive at an interesting time.  Just this week, Fordham axed their coach, Dereck Whittenburg, and appointed one of his assistants as an interim head coach.

It is really rare to make a change like that in the season, and it is even rarer to make it this early.  Which is not to say that the program isn't struggling.  They were 3-27 last year and 1-4 last year, the last loss being a shellacking at the hand of Manhattan (a intra-borough beat down).

Beyond that, there are reports that the team's leading scorer, Jio Fontan, has left the program. He is still listed on the roster as of Friday night.

So, into this troubled gym come the Falcons on the first game of their five game road trip.  The Falcons beat Fordham last year at AA in a game that was probably tighter than it needed to be.  In fact, Fordham had a lead at the half.

Freshman Chris Gaston looks like a really good player, scoring 15 and grabbing 11 boards, and you don't have any bad D1 players average double doubles.

They are a very poor shooting team, 36% for the season, which is among the five worst percentages in college basketball.  If BG can play some good defense, you'd expect to hold them even below that, and it becomes hard to imagine you could lose a game with that number.

Chips Champs...

The Chips won a closer than expected game today to claim the MAC Championship.  Congrats to them, they are clearly the best team in the conference.  3 championships in 4 years is a pretty good accomplishment.

Clawson Presser, Not all Boring Edition

Coach Clawson had his presser to end the regular season yesterday, and I encourage any Falcon fan to hop over and listen to the whole thing.  Very compelling stuff, and considerably more open now that the season has ended.

First, he dealt with the Kevin Alvarado situation, and gave what appeared to be a pretty transparent description of what had happened.

The gist of it is this:

• Kevin has presented no discipline problems--not even 30 seconds late for a meeting.
• Kevin disclosed the incident to Coach himself.
• Initially, it was not believed the police were going to be involved, and the situation was being addressed internally at the university and within the football program.
• Once charges were brought, the scope of the issue changed and Kevin was suspended from competition, pending the outcome of the case.

He was asked directly why Alvarado played two games after the assault, and Clawson said that was appropriate with an issue that appeared would not involve the court or the police.

As I noted in my first post on this, let's not make any assumptions until the issue is resolved.

In the meantime, Coach made it clear that the conduct of players is extremely important to the program, and that it will not be tolerated or accepted.  Young men will, however, continue to make mistakes.

He got a fairly pointed question concerning the fact that Coach Brandon was fired in part for discipline issues within the program, and he was brought in to fix that, and what did he think about the Alvarado situation from that perspective.

I thought he was a little defensive here.  He said that as a coach you deal with stuff like that everyday and it is never where you want it to be, which is not defensive by its words--more by the tone he used.

On other stuff, he said he was excited with the end of the season, winning 6 out of the last 7 games, and beating Toledo.  He noted that there were a number of games where BG was tied or losing in the fourth quarter and ended up winning (the most marked change from last year's team), and that he was very pleased with the way the first season ended.

His consistent them has been that even when the team was 1-4, they still practiced like they were a good team and kept working hard, and that was eventually what brought them out of it.  He especially noted that the OU game was a very tough loss, because of the dropped TD pass and the team being close when it ended.  (He also noted that if BG delivers on that game, we're probably playing in Detroit tonight.)

Anyway, he said that the biggest part of the season's success was that the seniors bought into the change and that was how the team exceeded expectations.  The players didn't fight his changes or try to keep things they way they used to be. 

He said the seniors motivated the team before the UT game by saying that if they won, they could stay a team for another month, and if they lost, it was all over.  That's pretty good stuff, in my opinion.

For the first time in public he talked about how thin this year's team is--and to some extent will be.  When you consider redshirts, injuries, etc, he said we were often down to 45-50 scholarship players who were available to play, which is a pretty low number and less even than an NFL team dresses for a game.  Starters had to play a lot of snaps, including special teams.

Just an aside:  if Brandon had been down to 45 scholarship players, he would have been whining about it all year.

He talked about how the Freddie Barnes season evolved.  He said that in spring practice, Barnes emerged as the top WR. Then, a rash of injuries hit the remaining WRs, and that necessitated getting the ball to Barnes on a priority basis.  If our WRs were healthy, he probably would have had somewhere in the 80 catch range.

He noted disappointment that BG was 6-2 in MAC play and only had four guys honored on the All-MAC team.  He noted that Sheehan deserved second team (which I covered earlier, it is a complete joke that Hiller was ahead of Sheehan and utterly indefensible).  In particular, he thought Jarrett Sanderson deserved to be honored.

Coach was asked if he felt that with all the first year starters on defense, it took a while for them to gel during the season.  He was pretty candid about citing the true difference as the defense with Mahone and without him.  We only lost one game where Mahone played this year and he made a huge difference to the defense.

Someone said they had been contacted to buy ads for the Humanitarian Bowl, but Clawson said there has not been any decision made on that.  He said that it will either be Boise, DC, or Toronto.  (Note:  I think everyone is expecting Boise).  He doesn't care who we play.

Finally, a cautionary note to the Falcon Nation.  The next two classes are considered pretty thin talent wise.  A lot of players who were recruited in those classes are no longer with the program.  While I have confidence in this coaching staff, it is quite possible that a couple of challenging years lie ahead for the program.  If we win next year, we will probably be exceeding expectations even more than this season.  (We'll look later at this, but even though most of our defense was playing for the first time, we were a very senior-dominated defense again this season).

Coach said that you have to recruit the right guys for our program...guys who want to be here and are committed to graduating from this university.   Obviously, our program had a couple years when we didn't do a very good job of that, and the price will be paid.  It wasn't all bad--remember that the prior regime recruited Freddie Barnes, Tyler Sheehan and Jarett Sanderson.  But, we won't have optimal numbers.

Anyway, there will be a lot more opportunities to rehash the season in the coming weeks and months, once it is ACTUALLY OVER, which it, thankfully, is not.

MAC Blog Roundtable is on the air....

This is our final issue for the regular season, and I just want to compliment my fellow MAC bloggers.  It was an excellent time this year, and I thought we had a lot of insightful and interesting conversations.  Hopefully, it added value to our readers as well.

BG to Face Interim Coach Saturday

Yesterday, Fordham announced that it has fired Head Basketball Coach Dereck Whittenburg.  Assistant Julian Grasso will serve as interim coach.

A mid-season firing is very rare in college basketball, and especially one this early in the season.  On the other hand, Fordham is 1-4 this year and was 3-25 last year, one of the worst teams in D1 hoops.

This should add an interesting counterpoint to the game on Saturday.

Whittenburg, of course, was on that NC State team that shocked Phi Slamma Jamma and had Jim Valvano running around the floor like a crazy man.

Falcons Avenge Savannah State Debacle, win at AA

I'll have more later, but BG avenged their heartbreaking loss in Savannah last year with a 59-51 victory at Anderson Arena.

In the post-game presser, Coach Orr called it a "step in the right direction" and I suppose it was.  He said that because with just under 4:00 left, the Tigers were up by 1 point.  From that point in, BG outscored them 11-2...."closing the game out" as Coach said.

The key basket came with with 2:29 left.  Tracy Rankins, the leading SSUM scorer had been unconscious from behind the arc for most of the game (single handedly keeping the Tigers in the game), and he lined up to shoot with his team down one.  Scott Thomas blocked the shot, a huge defensive play, and then on the other end, in the half court offense, things just didn't seem to be happening, and Joe Jakubowski created something off the dribble, sweeping down the left side of the key and getting the ball onto the glass and in the hoop.

That's a pretty nice swing right there.  Then, BG got a stop on a missed 3, and came down the floor.  We fed Otis on the inside, he drew coverage and kicked it to Jakubowski who nailed a 3.  From there BG was in pretty good shape.

Otis had 3 assists and no turnovers.  Yep.

Defensively, BG held SSUM to 51 points, which is below their season average.  We played zone the whole way, I believe, and sometimes it seemed like we had some real success with it, and sometimes the Tigers were finding pretty good shots.  We seem willing to allow the penetration pass to the elbow, because whoever shoots is going to have to get around or over Otis.

The stops coming home were key, and in addition to the block, Scott Thomas had a key steal as well.

As you can see here, it was a close and pretty tense game the whole way.

NCAA Basketball Stats

BG attempted only 7 3s in the whole game, which is pretty rare, even for our team.  Conversely, Savannah was 5-7 from beyond the arc in the first half and 2-12 in the second half.

Offensively, BG only turned the ball over 11 times, and had clearly prepared themselves to handle the press and it generally wasn't an issue.  The team is still struggling for a lack of perimeter shooting, and some of our shooters are slumping, but as long as they keep shooting (and they are), it will come around.

NCAA Basketball Stats

That's going to help a lot.  Coach keeps saying we are a work in progress, and that's certainly true.  The offense just struggles to get good shots for long periods of time, and then when we do get the ball inside, we have a hard time converting the short shots.  Our starting bigs were 6-18 from the field, for example.    The free throw shooting continues to be sub par (55% tonight).  The team clearly has some areas of improvement.

They now go on a run of 5 straight road games, which is a great opportunity for us to both grow as a team and get ready for conference play.  It will be a grind, though, no question about it.