Ohhhhh man, JackMD is going to tear the team a new one when he gets back to board tonight! I bet Nagy is scared $hitless right now of how mad JackMD is going to get over this game.
Ohhhhh man, JackMD is going to tear the team a new one when he gets back to board tonight! I bet Nagy is scared $hitless right now of how mad JackMD is going to get over this game.
Nagy's not the one who can't take care of the ball.
You give up 15 turnovers in the first half, you deserve to be down by 20.
I gotta say, Steve Imming is a pro's pro radio play-by-play announcer. He sounds just as interested in this sorry excuse for a game as he does in a nailbiter.
Did I hear coach Larson right...we only have seven scholarship players right now.
Heck, that's only half a team. No wonder we're struggling.
This will be a very, very, very different team next year.
This year needs to be about player development. Gilbert, Berte, Cadwell, Casey, anyone who wants to play next year needs to use the remainder of this season to work on the little things, the fundamentals. Passing, taking care of the ball, free throws, solid defense.
Did I hear coach Larson right...we only have seven scholarship players right now.
Heck, that's only half a team. No wonder we're struggling.
This will be a very, very, very different team next year.
This year needs to be about player development. Gilbert, Berte, Cadwell, Casey, anyone who wants to play next year needs to use the remainder of this season to work on the little things, the fundamentals. Passing, taking care of the ball, free throws, solid defense.
I thought he said we only had 6 sholarship players available tonight. Engen, Billitz, Hornby, Cordova, Bassett, and Holdren would take 6 of our 13 max, was Frias available to play tonight? I don't think he got any minutes, maybe he was the 7th?
Either way, we are at a tremendous disadvantage when we are playing against an established program. We may have been able to fill in holes with Berte and Frias, but I think not having a depth of scholarship players that have been in the system for a couple of years is a big reason for our inconsistencies. It takes a couple years before you can truly learn the ins and outs of a coaches offensive and defensive schemes, not to mention just the familiarity of playing with each other. We have the whole team plus the red-shirts back next year, hopefully they can continue to improve and make some good progress to take them into next year.
We'll get there, we just need to put things in perspective and continue to support the players and coaches as they fight through it!
MINNEAPOLIS - South Dakota State did its best impersonation of a gopher Friday night, burrowing another seemingly bottomless hole out of the gate with 15 first-half turnovers.
Minnesota accepted those bumbles like gift-wrapped presents, shredding any hopes of a Jackrabbit upset in the first 10 minutes. The Gophers opened the game with a 21-5 run and built it to as many as 28 points en route to an 80-61 victory.
Coach Scott Nagy, who sat on the SDSU bench below the elevated Williams Arena floor and could only roll his eyes at times, placed the blame on himself for a grueling pre-New Year schedule that has included a host of big-named universities. Every one of those games - against schools such as Kentucky, Illinois, Nebraska, Marquette and now Minnesota - proved to be a Jackrabbit loss.
"I just think tonight is a result of a tough, tough schedule before Christmas and tired, beat-up kids mentally and emotionally," Nagy said. "It's hard for me to even know how good Minnesota was because we were so bad. There was no compete in us at all, and that was my fault."
SDSU (3-9) finished the game with 23 turnovers that led to 29 Minnesota points. Redshirt freshmen Matt Cadwell and Andre Gilbert both had five points in their Twin Cities homecoming.
The Jacks are averaging more than 21 turnovers a game this season.
"Obviously, we didn't stick to the principles that we wanted to have throughout the game," said Cadwell, who led SDSU with 16 points and six assists. "Turnovers hurt us again, and we just didn't recover."
With the Gophers playing without two senior starters - leading scorer, guard Vincent Grier, and top rebounder J'Son Stamper - the Jackrabbits had their best chance to pull off their first victory over a major conference opponent since moving to Division I last year.
Instead, Minnesota (9-2) quickly and unsympathetically dashed those sugarplum dreams.
SDSU had no answer inside for Minnesota's Spencer Tollackson. The 6-foot-9 sophomore center scored all 16 of his first-half points in the paint, including a pair of three-point plays and a thunderous dunk with no Jackrabbit within 3 feet of him late in the half for a 44-26 cushion at intermission.
The Gophers had a 34-22 scoring advantage in the post in the game behind Tollackson's career-best 22 points on 10 of 14 shooting, but most of the Jacks' inside buckets came after Minnesota put the game well out of reach in the second half.
"Defensively, I thought we were very focused early," Gophers coach Dan Monson said. "They had 12 points in (the opening) 14 minutes. Then, we began to play the scoreboard a little bit."
In the meantime, SDSU basically tied a bow on the easy win for Minnesota. Although they didn't reach their season-worst 32 turnovers committed at Marquette, the Jackrabbits began coughing up the ball almost immediately after the opening tip and didn't stop until the final halftime buzzer.
Four turnovers in the first five minutes. Four more in the next three and a half minutes. Ten total by the midway point in the half, twice as many turnovers as they had points. And those blunders helped compound a six-minute Jackrabbit scoring drought in which the Gophers rattled off 11 straight points.
"We've got to figure out how to get a good start consistently," said junior forward Ben Beran, who had 13 points and eight rebounds. "It's tough to keep going every night like we've been. We've been playing well and played tough against Nebraska. There was just no excuse for the way tonight went. We did it to ourselves."
Gilbert added nine points and seven rebounds for SDSU, while Mohamed Berte had nine points and Andy Kleinjan, the only Jackrabbit without a turnover, scored eight.
The Gophers shot 52.4 percent on the night. Maurice Hargrow had 17 points, while fellow guard Adam Boone had 11 points and a career-high 11 assists.
Minnesota has won all nine meetings between the two schools. The Jacks and Gophers, who last met in 1983, are scheduled to meet again at Williams Arena for three more years.
"Every team we play right now is good because we're not very good," Nagy said. "I would hope that the following three years we come back here that we'll be a heck of a lot better than we were tonight. If we don't, then I want to get out of the contract, because I'm not going to sit there and watch that."
More immediately, SDSU players will take a few days off to celebrate the holiday with their families, returning to practice the day after Christmas to prepare for Wednesday's game against Butler University at Frost Arena.
"The Butler game means a lot to us because we got it handed to us tonight, and we've got to recover," Cadwell said. "We've got to start handing it to some people now."
Ohhhhh man, JackMD is going to tear the team a new one when he gets back to board tonight! I bet Nagy is scared $hitless right now of how mad JackMD is going to get over this game.
With regards to this game I am going to adopt a philosophy that I practice in life but that I haven't used much here.
If you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all.
As for Nagy, he shares my frustration regarding this years team. We just haven't had any breaks with the move to DI.
We are here to add what we can to life, not get what we can from life. -Sir William Osler
We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.
With regards to this game I am going to adopt a philosophy that I practice in life but that I haven't used much here.
If you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all.
As for Nagy, he shares my frustration regarding this years team. We just haven't had any breaks with the move to DI.
That there is the key. Our men's team has had nothing but bad luck from day 1 of D-I. It will eventually even out, but sometimes you need to make your own luck . . .
Something else Coach Larson said last night--they really do need to re-evaluate their scheduling. Schedule a couple of D-II/NAIA teams early in the season to get the kinks worked out and get a bit of confidence and flow. You can't get the kinks worked out when you're playing the likes of Illinois and Kentucky.
I think we'll see a less ambitious early season schedule next year. Something more along the lines of what NDSU is doing.
I noticed that from across the arena. No Jose on the bench and I didn't see him in street clothes.
Too soon to speculate one way or another. Could be he left the team, could be there was a family issue. Patience, all. We'll know what happened soon enough.
Something happened after the Manhatten game in the locker room area. Could be he was being diciplined for the UM game. Still if that were the case you'd expect him to travel with the team.
Comment