I don’t really worry at all about the couple recent losses – those were both on the road at what may be the two best teams in CUSA. The Little Rock one was a bit of a surprise, but we also beat the everloving hell out of ASU, so it averages out. That’s basketball for 90% of the country.
We’re good at rebounding (73rd in country/1st in ASUN in RPG, 112th in country, 2nd in ASUN in rebound margin); we’re good at turnovers (46th country/1st ASUN in TO margin; 40th/1st in fewest TOs committed); and we’re good at defense (21st/1st in FG% Defense; 81st/2nd in Scoring Defense). Those are all largely effort things.
And the shooting isn’t really far off. We’re just one 3-point make per game away from being a Top 50 3-point % team. We’re three FGs per game from being a national Top 50 shooting % team (only 11 teams out of 359 are shooting over 50%). It’s a pretty thin line between looking problematic and looking pretty good. We’re 4th in 3pt% and 5th in FG% in the ASUN, so the teams we’re playing the rest of the way aren’t just worlds better. And you’d think we’d have an easier time making shots against most ASUN teams than we would against Arkansas, Missouri, Arkansas State, Louisiana Tech, and Missouri State.
The only thing I think is a potentially critical flaw (and by critical I mean reason we might go 14-4 instead of 18-0) is fouls/free throws. I know a couple games it’s just seemed like pretty lopsided officiating, but that hasn’t been the case in all of them. Yet we’ve given up more FTs than we’ve shot in 9 of the 12 games (ASU, Grambling & Hendrix went our way). Opponents have shot 17.2 more FTs per game than us in our 5 losses, and we’ve committed 11.2 more fouls per game in those. Seems like too big a sample size to chalk it all up to biased, piss-poor officiating. Clean that up a little bit and we should be good. Don’t clean that up, and we might still be the best team in the league … we just might drop a couple extra games along the way.
It may not look perfect every night, but I figure we’re going to be just fine. This doesn’t seem like a vintage FGCU team, so we’ve got a shot there – don’t walk in feeling like you’re down a dozen at the tip. And we only get Austin Peay once – and they come to the Farris Center. I don’t see any reason to think this team isn’t going to be in the mix for the league title.
