MountainBear
1st back-to-back D1 home wins since 2019, had back-to-back D1 wins twice in 2023-24 alone - though none last year. We’ve been bad, but not that bad.
I guess it’s semantics, but we did win two D1 home games in a row last year, but with 4 road games in between; and in January of ’24, but there were three road games in between those. So this is the first time we’ve done it in back-to-back games that were both at home. Whatever. Either way, we haven’t done it enough the last 20 years, so it’s good to see us taking advantage of the home court and decisively beating teams on our level.
On that note, it is, however, our first time ever to beat D1 teams in back-to-back home games by 20+ in each.
EWU’s record isn’t great (and not that comparing scores is always indicative of anything, really) but you look at it and we beat them by 27 … No. 12 UCLA only beat them by 6; Colorado by 5; and North Texas (which beat us by 18) only beat them by 8. So we got after them more than those three teams did combined.
EIU, we beat them by 21, which is one more than Notre Dame did. Lost to Valpo by 3, beat Nicholls. So these are teams capable of being in games, they aren’t getting their heads beat in just every night out. Now, we may turn around and be the ones taking the beating next time out, but for now it’s nice to be on this end of a couple of those.
28-60 (46.7%) from 3 the last two games is really nice. Not reasonable to expect to shoot it at that clip all year, but after starting out 41-162 (25.3%) in the first five games, it’s good to see we do have the capacity to do it sometimes.
Hopefully we can go do something similar against 5-1 ETSU that was picked 4th just behind Samford in the SoCon preseason poll, and is coming off a 42-point beatdown of ULM.
