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A few basketball notes we couldn't get to until now due to severe back pain and C. Florida trolls surrounding us:
One is that women's hoops leading scorer from last season, senior Inga Orekhova, underwent surgery on her knee yesterday for an injury sustained earlier this season. We thought Inga might be hurt after her unusually bad start (14-54 from the field, just 7.0 points and 3.8 rebounds a game), so hopefully shutting her down now will get her back in form for the majority of AAC play.
"It started to get progressively worse," Coach Jose Fernandez said. "We got an MRI last Tuesday, and we were able to get her in surgery Monday morning. She tried to go against NC-Central and just couldn't. We hope to get her back soon."
On the other side, due to dealing with overwhelming amounts of C. Florida last week, we missed writing about the men's team and their 65-60 loss to Detroit Mercy (the school so nice, it sounds like a hospital!) last Saturday. We did watch the game on ESPN3, and all we can say is... woof.
The defensive effort the Bulls game for the majority of the game was borderline atrocious, particularly on the glass. When your opponent is playing a 2-3 zone all night and you're running man-to-man, they can't outrebound you 44-35. When every team you play is zoning you because they know you can't shoot a lick, you can't be 3-18 from three-point range on a ton of wiiiiiiiiide open looks. When you want to get out and run against athletically inferior competition, you can't only have 10 points on fast breaks.
The Bulls got a nice game from Martino Brock, who was 7-12 from the floor and looked the most interested defensively of the guys in white, but that's not nearly enough. Detroit is a bad basketball team that has about zero chance of being in the Top 150 in RPI, and they beat the Bulls on their home floor. For a team we've been screaming from the mountaintops all year we think is underrated... they sure didn't look it Saturday night.
It was just one game but it comes on the heels of an unimpressive performance against Stetson, and an I'm-not-even-mad-I'm-just-impressed beatdown by Oklahoma State. That's why this is so important:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p><a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23USF&src=hash">#USF</a>'s Martino Brock said the upperclassmen held a team meeting last night to discuss the issues surrounding the team.</p>— Jeff Odom (@ByJeffOdom) <a href="https://twitter.com/ByJeffOdom/statuses/407569613874946048">December 2, 2013</a></blockquote>
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There's not a lot of time to fix this, but still plenty of season to turn it around.
Right now both the men's and women's teams are mirrors of each other: Both are 4-2, with four should-win wins, one loss each to a Top 10 team at home (men OK State, women Maryland), and one loss each to a team they should have drilled at home (men Detroit, women Clemson). We're only six games in out of 30, and there's still plenty of time for both these teams to have special seasons. But they'll want to get it going sooner than later.