The Unofficial Furman Football Page

Trying to put things into perspective. Our current record I believe is what most of us thought would be the best case scenario after 5 games. The only difference is the Louisville game went into the W column and Navy did not. The basketball season has pretty much mirrored the football season. Good start, get hopes up,,then a huge reality check. The team that we saw last weekend did not resemble the team we saw this weekend. Why? Has to be mental and CBR now has to figure it out. Now we have 2 winnable road games but could lose one or both. We proved this weekend there are no gimmes on the schedule. The Radford and Navy games exposed our weaknesses much earlier than usual. Better now than later. Gives us much more time to correct things. I would much rather be playing a tough schedule than a much softer one and have a better record. As for us FU fans we should know by now not to get hopes up. It’s gut check time. The next 2 games will tell us a lot about this team.

Maybe we over think this stuff. It looks like if we shoot 40-50% from 3 we win. If we shoot around 30% we lose. It’s that simple. There are going to be bad shooting nights, but hopefully fewer this year. Two guys actually shot well yesterday but they didn’t shoot enough.

We will live and die by the 3 pt shot. We have no true "go-to" inside player - Hien and Slaw will get a few pts inside, but beyond that, everything will be 3 pt'ers or drives to the basket. I wish we had a little more depth down low.

Paladin91 wrote: ↑

Mon Nov 22, 2021 2:23 pm

We will live and die by the 3 pt shot. We have no true "go-to" inside player - Hien and Slaw will get a few pts inside, but beyond that, everything will be 3 pt'ers or drives to the basket. I wish we had a little more depth down low.

Correct, our personnel dictates we have to shoot a lot of 3’s. Right now the inside game we do have is hit and miss at best. Navy was comparatively small but still killed us on the boards.

Garrison seems to be our best pure 3 point shooter. Maybe Alex Williams is going to be good there also. Everybody else it depends on the night-that was the case also with Mounce and Gurley last year. I think all of that means our ceiling is high and our floor is low-we can beat any team on our schedule or lose to anyone on a given night.

Maybe Repass will develop. We need Lawrence back. I miss Rafferty. He spoiled us.

Navy got and made easy shots all night. We missed most of our easy shots and were average from 3’s.

It all depends on the night! We will need another pure shooter after Garrison’s one year.

Need to use Garrison more while we've got him.

We really need to make it happen this year. You need at least 3 really good 3 shooters for our approach to work. We have two pretty consistent ones and one hot and cold one. We probably lose all of them after this year.

Hard to believe shooters are that hard to find. Plenty languish in DII but maybe have TOEFL (language) issues. Anyway, if they are that hard to find, maybe we need to tweak our approach and go bigger. I think we are favorites to win the conference, but the trick is to get all the way through the tournament without an off shooting night. On those nights we really struggle.

All teams will have off shooting nights. I admit that that is more of a problem for 3 point shooting teams. The key to winning is the defense, which should be more consistent than shooting. We lost the Navy game at the defensive end of the court. They got good mid-range looks and were able to drive the ball to the basket at will.

Their defense made us work for every shot and we never seemed to get anything easy. As for post defense, which seemed lacking in the Navy game, I thought was right good in the Louisville and Belmont games. I can't figure that out. Heck, L-ville beat Navy by 17 points.

I think the key to the rest of the season is going to be the development of Repass and Williams. Repass is not ready yet but if he can improve he's going to be a real bruiser down low. Williams is already looking good and can shoot it. He's listed at 205 lbs. Ha Ha. I bet he's at least 230. I would like to see him around the basket more and not shooting to many 3's. We got other people that can do that. Also will help when J. Lawrence is back.

You can bet your a** that Garrison will get more opportunities to shoot 3's. That would help take some of the pressure off Both.

I think its fair to say that if our 3% is down around 30, the game is a tossup no matter who we play. If we shoot around 40% we probably win. Our inside game is decent. We opt not to participate in the midrange game. So you just defend the 3 line against us and contest the rim. But that's the game we choose to play. We sort of concede the bad shooting games and hope there aren't many of them. We will hopefully win all but a few games. However, if one of the bad games is in the tournament we are hosed (unless we go on a tear with the remaining OOC's and get some more street cred).

Our defense is what it is. We aren't big so we need to be scrappy. But we aren't deep so we can't be too scrappy or fouls will kill us. Better off just scoring a ton.

Note to self: Losing right before long holiday break not a good plan