Pomeroy gives BYU a 23% chance of winning at their place
EPSN gives BYU a 19% chance of winning at their place
SDSU is full of Seniors, 8 to be exact. They will start where they left off last year.
Remember 6’ 10 Mensah? he killed us inside last year.
Bradley 6’4
Trammell, 5’10 are the asist guys and shoot over 50% from 3 #2-Seiko is rated highest on the team (about where Barcellos was all year long.
Everyone of these guys are seniors, the rest are Jrs with only 3 underclassmen. SDSU is a methodical don’t waste possessions, nothing fast paced about this team (think SMC)
Yikes. Feels like these guys want a shot at the national title.
Pomeroy has the game SDSU 73-64. Massey has the game SDSU 69-64. I think it will be worse. Still figuring out our lineup.
Pope said he could learn a lot from the ISU debacle. I’m not so sure of that. I’m not sure what we learn from being mostly outplayed by a Big Sky team that won 7 games last year.
Friday night at SDSU? Now THIS is where we get taken to school. I’d be happy to see us even make it competitive (within 10 points).
That said, we can learn a lot by playing a possible final 4 team:
which of our new players can compete athletically.
do we have a guy who can hit 3s against tight man D (I’m looking at you, Rudi)
will we aggressively hunt shots—as Pope has promised—or spent 25 seconds every possession with every guy trying NOT to be the guy to shoot it, like we did vs ISU.
finally, who leads this team? Who handles the ball and gets a score when we need it down the stretch, to stop a run, or to bury our opponent during a run of our own? Vs ISU, it was no one for 39.5 minutes. Fouss was good at times, but 6 TOs doesn’t cut it if you are gonna be The Man. SJ was clutch for 30 seconds, but for 39.5 minutes he was just solid—like he always has been. Who will it be?
The good news is Curious George had his bad game, in theory, this should be his good game?
Were you not shocked that Hall was leading the team in crunch time? Wake up call for Rudi. He should start to show us why we recruited him but it is great to know Hall will be on the wings.
BYU has serious upside, with Robinson and Waterman getting more comfortable with each game.
We will see improvement but just not Friday night.
I would be worried if Pope didn’t learn something from that game.
For example:
As it has been pointed out previously, the players seemed to try to be unselfish too much. Many gave up good shots to try to get someone a better shot. That is something Pope could not only learn, but how to overcome it during practice.
As Fish stated, Hall (fresh off a mission) was running the team during crunch time… That is something Pope learn; Hall is ready to play (according to DesNews)
As for ISU only winning 7 games last year, which is true, but this coach brough in a lot of transfer players to help bolster the team (including BYU’s Lee). So, it is not good comparison for last year.
I’d be happy to see Pope give up on winning and start focusing ala John Wooden on having the team play well together. If the team doesn’t play like a five deer in the headlights I will be happy.
SDSU will win by somewhere near 20, maybe even 30 if the BYU team that played against ISU shows up.
I would say I was “surprised” rather than shocked. But credit Pope by not showing blind deference to a senior when the senior couldn’t run the team that night.
On the dribble, Hall looks big and he looks strong. Reminds me of KC in that regard.
Despite Rudi’s awful BYU debut, he has to be good if BYU has any hope of a decent season.
Something I was always do before the season starts is write up a comparable of this year vs. last year:
We will get a feel for what BYU really is by about 10 games in as Pope puts it and SDSU is going to buzz saw us, that is a given, but nothing has changed for me.
BYU will only go as far a Rudi and Hall takes us
BYU’s veterans will save the day as we saw in the ISU game. Foos, Johnson and George won that game. Correction, Curious George was MIA but that just means he will show up in the SDSU game, right? Meat Loaf - Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad (PCM Stereo) - YouTube
To see Waterman up close: Long, deadly from outside but what jumped out was his fire, this dude wants it bad. won’t be long before he is a lock for 6th man or starter.
Robison smooth, can really fill er up, has all the game but needs some of what Waterman has.
Says it all. Is this a dance team? We certainly have the pieces. Just need Atiki to figure things out and George to put it all together. Easy Pezzi.
Westcliff is an NAIA university in California. I’m not sure how good their basketball team is.
That said, BYU could easily be–but isn’t–on the upset list of teams having bad games this first week of the season, including Louisville (Bellarmine), Oklahoma (Sam Houston St.), and USC (Florida Gulf Coast).
I’ll climb out on the Waterman limb with you. Watching his film from last year–he got better as the year went on. Went from being a role player to a team leader. That takes both skill and fire. Great ballhandler for a guy his size–meaning he can be more than just a guy standing on the 3 point line the whole game.
Vegas has BYU as an 11 point dog. I think that’s generous. SDSU 75-BYU 59.
Hey now, no need to be such a quick downer. It’s only the first game and there is a LOT BYU can might have learned. Let’s hope that is the case.
BYU needs to play smarter basketball. There were a lot of turnovers and dumb mistakes.
The team will get better (hopefully) with each passing game. The can learn how to play together.
Hopefully they learned that there is no need to press when the game is close and there is still lots of time left. They were pressing only a few minutes into the second half and that is where they got into trouble. They couldn’t find a rhythm, they committed careless turnovers, they had poor shot selection (way too many three’s attempted) and they just didn’t play well.
Even when a team or player isn’t playing well, they can find things to be effective and smart. They couldn’t find those things because they kept pressing and it didn’t work… it rarely does. When they actually did press physically it helped create turnovers and put the pressure on Idaho State. Even at the end, the veteran Johnson made a couple dumb mistakes and only redeemed himself with a three that might have easily missed and resulted in a BYU loss.
Lastly, people dogged me when I questioned Kolby Lee being a D-1 player for BYU. He’s a good dude but I rest my case after this game.
Well I just found the game by going to Facebook typing in BYU basketball. It led me to the mountain west link and you can stream the game live.
Pleasantly surprised to see the first half in Byu’s favor
I turned the game on with BYU leading 18-8 early in the first half and I thought to myself, wow this is going well, maybe the Cougars have a chance. Then I saw who was officiating the game… actually I saw 2 of 3 officials and I won’t drop names but one has the initials D. H. and he has always been a BYU hater and the other, who was probably the youngest of the 3 has always been a BYU hater and I thought to myself… 2 of these 3 I have seen exhibit strong bias against BYU over the years.
I knew BYU would not win the game.
Near the end it seemed like they had a chance because they were making shots and playing smart but the free throw disparity (I surmised it was about 3-1 in favor of SDSU midway thru the second half) was too much to overcome and the Cougars lost a game that was basically 5 against 7 most of the night.
Its really too bad but something we should be used to by now. I am resigned to the fact that haters will hate and the Cougars just have to play harder to even have a small chance at winning a game like this.
When Pope subbed Saunders, Stewart and Hall in BYU was up by 12. Before Pope could fix that mind fart, BYU was up 2.
I thought we got some pretty good calls in the 2nd half, no complaints on the reffing. Not sad about this loss, SDSU can be a final 4 team. Robison looked much more tenacious tonight. Waterman, a little gun shy.
BYU lost that game on turnovers, simple as that. Rudi had 9, your point guard had 9, let that sink in.
Rudy had 8 turnovers and Hall 4. 12 out of 20. But, 3 to 1 foul shots is is like Republicans trying to win against cheating Democrats. That definately was a factor. We then shot 3’s poorly in the 2nd half. Especially Robison. But, a much better game than we thought would happen.
Sorry Chris, disagree there but that’s okay because it is a healthy disagree. SDSU spent most of the second half at the free throw line and that was a travesty to an otherwise very good game. I believe BYU still had a chance to win in spite of it so I don’t blame the loss entirely on officiating. Had they made their two free throws when they were down by 3 with a couple minutes or so to go I would have still believed. I just don’t agree that SDSU was deserving of 36 free throw attempts as they certainly didn’t earn all of those opportunities. There were a lot of no call reach in fouls that went as “steals”. There was some stealing going on but it was from the SDSU guys in stripes, not basketball uniforms.
I’m not sure SDSU was fouled every time they drove to the basket and BYU wasn’t but that is how the officials saw it. Very similar plays on both ends with different results. I saw a lot of bail out calls that favored SDSU and as usual, D.H. always gets amped up when he can make a call against BYU at a key point in the game. He called a block one time and pointed at the restricted circle as if the BYU player was inside that area in order to justify the bad call. Well, our guy was not inside the circle so it was a bad call x2. Then later I thought he was going to jump out of his shoes when he called the block on BYU near midcourt. Just because you run up to where you think the foul occurred and overact with the block motion by hitting your fists several times on your hips doesn’t mean it was a good call. It more likely means you feel like you have to over exaggerate to sell a marginal call. It was a key call that kept any hope of BYU coming back from materializing.
He has a history of doing this to BYU, add to it the fact that he is out of shape and a biased official just got worse. The other dude is arrogant and never thinks he makes the wrong call. For a good stretch of the game the only official that made a call against SDSU was the older, gray haired ref. Trust me, I was keeping track. It’s unfortunate but we’ve seen it from both of those officials for years now. It pains them to make a call for BYU. Don’t let the occasional call in favor of BYU fool you into believing it was a well officiated game. Without the 20+ extra attempts I don’t think SDSU would have won.
Lastly, I’ll take whatever line you are giving on SDSU making the final four.
I totally agree with you. Because I didn’t see the game and I thought D.H. was officiating the game last night.
Back to the rest of the nonconference games will be more fun to watch.
BUT against WCC Forget it!
I only got to see the second half. we did get good calls for the 1st 20 minutes, then a bunch of bad calls at the end. Rudi did us no favors coughing it up in cruch time.
