Furman @ Mercer (Dec. 20)

[furpop16]

I'm gonna need another bottle of tequila.

[CharlieFU]

Road win in SoCon is big. Mercer has some players. Toughed it out, which will no doubt help us down the road.

[din23]

Whew, 1-0. On to VMI.

[apaladin]

That last inbounds pass by Mounce could have been worse than the Miracle on the Mountain and the bonehead play of the year.

A win is a win is a win. TRUE

BUT I hope this will be a wake up call. We will not beat ETSU, UNCG or Wofford with the way we played tonight.

I'm not sure there is another SoCon team we beat playing like that. I hope we cannot play worse. Man we can look so good sometimes but tonight was ugly. Good to see Gurley come thru in the last 3-4 mins after scoring only 2 points until then. We really struggle when he struggles on offense. Just glad this one somehow went in the W column. A loss would have been a real downer. Let's blame it on exams and a week off. Bad news is it's 11 days off now. VMI will be another tough game. They have 2 more games before we play them whille we sit.

[Affirm]

That last inbounds pass by Mounce could have been worse than the Miracle on the Mountain and the bonehead play of the year.

A win is a win is a win. TRUE

BUT I hope this will be a wake up call. We will not beat ETSU, UNCG or Wofford with the way we played tonight.

I'm not sure there is another SoCon team we beat playing like that. I hope we cannot play worse. Man we can look so good sometimes but tonight was ugly. Good to see Gurley come thru in the last 3-4 mins after scoring only 2 points until then. We really struggle when he struggles on offense. Just glad this one somehow went in the W column. A loss would have been a real downer. Let's blame it on exams and a week off. Bad news is it's 11 days off now. VMI will be another tough game. They have 2 more games before we play them whille we sit.

Sorry to see that description of how we played. So glad we won, but I just thought Mercer must be really good and we hung in & toughed one out. Did not watch. We need to be ready for this New Year’s Day 2020 test. Let’s start out 2020 the right way. Let’s not have to look for excuses for why we lose to VMI. I imagine we could easily come up with several excuses in advance, right now, 11 days ahead of the game.
Go Furman.

[Jasper]

The only good thing to come out of this game was the play of Jordan Lyons. He picked a great time to return to the form we have come to expect from him. Sure hope that continues.
Mercer has a good coach who got them a lot of open shots off his offensive sets. They missed a lot of them.
We have too many inconsistent players. We did not look like the same team that lost in OT to Auburn.
Teams with "big battleship" types in the 5 are going to give us a lot of trouble this year. We did not handle their very pedestrian bigs on the boards well at all. rebounds, put backs, etc.
Substitutions are somewhat confusing.

I certainly hope this was simply a poor effort on the road. We cannot compete with UNCG, ETSU and Wofford playing like this.

[tim]

I'm hoping Beeker develops soon. He can really help this team!

[The Jackal]

Glad to see the win.

Perhaps I'm just more myopic than the rest of you, but I see a conference win on the road and an opportunity to keep getting better. It's nice to be good enough where you can not play your best and still beat teams like Mercer.

We are a quality team. Quality teams win games like this.

[apaladin]

I think we will continue to see more of the 3 guard offense. Last night Bothwell played more than Slawson and Clark combined:
Bothwell: 28 minutes 8 points 3-6
Slawson and Clark: 25 minutes 4 points 2-9

[tya1]

Throwing that inbound pass to Lyons was a perfectly acceptable choice. Lyons was wide open (his defender had stumbled and fallen) and Lyons is the best FT shooter on the team so far this year. Isn't that where you want to throw a pass? I have have seen many times where a long pass goes out of bounds without being touched.

We had a bad start offensively and several players struggled on offense. Teams often take a different approach once the conference schedule starts. I think Mercer decided to take their chances with Slawson and Clark and devote their defense to slowing down Lyons, Mounce, and Gurley.

Mercer had the services of two players who weren't with them earlier in the season. Senior Ross Cummings missed a month with injury problems. He scored 12 off the bench. Jeff Gary just became eligible after transferring from UNCW. He had 13 last night. Mercer's record would have been better if those guys had playing all season. On the other hand, we closed down Mercer's leading scorer for the season, Ethan Stair, who scored over 13 points less than his season's average. The Bears' second leading scorer for the year, Dimitrijevic, was also well below his season scoring. We left Bender alone near the basket, but that can be adjusted for when we play them next.

[furpop16]

Throwing that inbound pass to Lyons was a perfectly acceptable choice. Lyons was wide open (his defender had stumbled and fallen) and Lyons is the best FT shooter on the team so far this year. Isn't that where you want to throw a pass? I have have seen many times where a long pass goes out of bounds without being touched.

We had a bad start offensively and several players struggled on offense. Teams often take a different approach once the conference schedule starts. I think Mercer decided to take their chances with Slawson and Clark and devote their defense to slowing down Lyons, Mounce, and Gurley.

Mercer had the services of two players who weren't with them earlier in the season. Senior Ross Cummings missed a month with injury problems. He scored 12 off the bench. Jeff Gary just became eligible after transferring from UNCW. He had 13 last night. Mercer's record would have been better if those guys had playing all season. On the other hand, we closed down Mercer's leading scorer for the season, Ethan Stair, who scored over 13 points less than his season's average. The Bears' second leading scorer for the year, Dimitrijevic, was also well below his season scoring. We left Bender alone near the basket, but that can be adjusted for when we play them next.

I sensed CBR's post-game interview had the same tone as your post. If our guys had played sloppily or sluggishly he would've called it out, which he didn't. And he was understanding of, not bewildered by, Mounce's inbound pass. In a couple of interviews I have heard Coach second guess his decision to schedule the additional non-conference game. Not just because the team is exhausted, but they've been short on quality practice time. These eleven days will allow him to recover both.

[FU03times]

I’d like to throw it back to a year ago when we barely beat WCU and this board went wild. I think that we as fans need to adopt the mindset the coaches are trying to teach to the players: every game is different and independent from the previous or the following game. We are playing against a team with skill, talent, and plays based on how they have studied furman. We can expect and desire to win, and we need to learn to celebrate the W’s more instead of almost treating them like losses because we didn’t win by a huge margin to a team WE haven’t seen before (every season we have a different team!) and we thought we could easily beat. Last year’s W to WCU was rough but that WCU team i saw in Timmons was NOTHING like the fans’ perception of WCU and what they had done the year before. To me, Mercer looked like a competitive team. This wasn’t an easy game and it wasn’t just because we didn’t play hard or we made too many mistakes.

When all the bracketollogy experts and college basketball fans were putting down Nova after we beat them, we were here to say “you know, maybe it’s not that Nova is bad, maybe it’s that Furman is actually good.” Where’s that mindset now? I haven't seen enough to say that Mercer is not good.
Celebrate the W, learn from the mistakes, move on!

[purplehorse]

What Jasper said above: “ We have too many inconsistent players.”

There you have it pure and simple. We could lose to most teams in the conference on a given night or even beat any team on a given night.” The key is to match up your better play with the better opponents.

[Flagman]

I see a team where when one player falls off a bit, another one takes up the slack. That’s what a team does.

[FurmAlum]

We didn't play our best game of the year, but we toughed it out and won a close game on the road against a well coached and well prepared opponent that looked to me that is better than their record, and that's good enough for me.

If I was the coach or a player, I wouldn't pay any attention what so ever to anything written on this board.