LMU must have played a lot of road games so far

But I listened to it and it was obvious BYU played closer to their ability in the 2nd half. Which is by far better than LMU’s best ability in which they continued in the 2nd half. I give credit where credit is due with BYU :grimacing:
Happy New Year!!!

Sorry to tell you but that just isn’t true. BYU didn’t play that great of a second half… they still did a lot of things wrong. They forced it into Mika, who never really got on track, way too much. They took quick, ill advised shots and their defense wasn’t that great… again.

No, this was clearly a case of LMU absolutely choking the game away. BYU scored the last 11 points, even though LMU had open shots, missed layups, etc. It wasn’t fantastic play from BYU that won the game (even though Haws made some clutch shots and Childs had a block at the end), it was terrible play that lost if for LMU.

This week somebody writing about a different game said something germane: “One thing nearly everyone in the world struggles with is knowing how much of Wednesday’s result was DePaul playing really well or Villanova playing poorly. We just assume it was some combination of the two. The advantage of using multiple games to evaluate a team is that the effect of opponents over- or under-achieving should even out.”
The writer predicted the outcome, (or rather his algorithm predicted) BYU over LMU 82-76. The prediction was a total of 1 point off. In other words, both teams by the end of the game played pretty much as they have the whole season.
Whether LMU stank it up in the second half or BYU played amazing, each team essentially just brought their play back to their norm.
For BYU this is bad, because they are supposed to be improving.
One could also look at it optimistically as saying that for a first road game of the season the fact that they played their predicted average is a positive. First road games tend to be worse than normal games and this one wasn’t so chalk it up as a statistical step forward.

Ya we should have scored 87 points and then you would think we were average. We played great defense and that translates into great offense except for Mika.

No… it doesn’t necessarily. For the last time I am going to say it. BYU did not play great defense. Had you said this after the Santa Clara game I would have agreed with you. This is not what happened in the LMU game.

I won’t say it again. You can choose to think what you want…

Come on. There is a reason for missing their shots. Good defense got them rattled. Got them out of rythem. You can appreciate this :slight_smile: