Chris Datres

Griggey, would you say that Bilas is in the wrong for his critcism? They showed a stat on Gameday that fouls per team per game are something like 16.3, which is the lowest in a long time. Your game today will certainly mess with that average!! The vast majority of the time, they get the calls right and games are well-officiated. If anyone got a chance to watch Texas Tech-Texas today, that was an all-time street brawl but the crew did an excellent job managing it and there weren't really any unnecessary whistles. I think the biggest issue that I have is how the defense gets way too much leeway when trying to draw a charge. But at the same time, we're 25+ games into the season for everybody and if they haven't figured out how these get called every night, then they deserve to get whistled. Jump stop at 8 feet and hit the floater. Or better yet, bounce pass to your buddy driving the lane for an easy layup (if he hasn't already flared to the corner for no reason).

It's a Saturday that has 144 games going on across the country. We have known for years that the CAA is not going to get the best of the best in stripes. I was surprised that TV Ted showed up in Wilmington on Thursday night and I'm sorry he did because he was his normal terrible self. How he gets late tourney and Final Four assignments boggles my mind. Tim Clougherty was one of the officials in Wilmington and I think he gets by on nepotism as he's either the son or some other relative of longtime college ref, John Clougherty. The other guy in Wilmington I used to officiate with here in Central Florida. He was the junior member of the crew and it kinda looked at it, especially by the way Ted tried to take over that game. As for today, that wasn't noted pathetic official Jamie Luckie out there. It was Kyle Luckie and guessing by the spelling of the last name, it was probably a relative. And judging by some of the reviews of our game (I had radio only), he lived up to his family name as did the rest of the crew. Bottom line is that despite all of the adversity from the road trip to the hostile away arenas to the incompetent officiating, we found ways to win both games, each in impressive fashion (though each very different too). We've got 1 1/2 home games coming up now and hopefully, JMU is going to be missing at least one guy, provided they call that a punch. If they don't have any suspensions, ok fine, we're still miles better than they are and we'll just have to go out and prove it.

Welp, a lot of excitement today at the top of the table but everything remains unchanged. Sure, it would have been nice to get that extra help from JMU and/or NE. But the objective continues -- as long as we win, we're gonna hang a banner. Simple as that. And if we think a 9-point deficit with 18:30 left is big trouble, well, we already scaled that mountain today in a hornet's nest.

Dude, don't make my already less-favorable opinion of you get any worse by spewing this crap. JMU had an 85% FT shooter on the line to salt it away in regulation and he clanked both. Explain how that's fixed. So dumb.

And that's why you go to the basket when you're down less than 3.

If they don't go to the rack and try to get contact, they're not very bright.

Isn't this conference fun????

Dude's gotta show the ENTIRE video and not just the part that suits his agenda. Clearly a punch thrown by the JMU player which should eject him and suspend him for our game.

Does Stephen Ross also work for the CAA? Don't be ridiculous with that stuff.

And this is why you can't rely on others to do your dirty work.

Trying to find it but I do know that if you leave the bench for an altercation, it's an automatic ejection but not necessarily a suspension. If you get ejected for throwing a punch, that's a 1-game suspension. Perhaps our resident college official can also shed some light here.

We're too far gone in the season for the officials to finally wake up and realize what's a charge and what isn't. If you drive to the basket and hit a secondary defender, you're getting a charge unless that defender is in the circle. That's what it has come to and it's horrifically wrong. Refs want to show off their charge call and it's just getting ridiculous across college basketball (pro tip -- making a theatrical blocking call is just as showy...though it may confuse some people as I found out this season...but i digress). That's why it's so important for players to have a pullup jumper in their arsenal because you just can't risk taking it all the way to the cup with guys sliding over late and getting rewarded for it. As for the rest of this game, I have to admit that I gave up on them with 12 minutes left and we were down 11. Charleston kept hitting 3's and we decided that outside was more important than inside with the Cougars already at the bonus. That was pretty frustrating as we could have lived at the line a lot more than we did. Though, the way we shot free throws was pretty hideous too. Incredibly lucky to win this game but good teams find ways to win. Also, this is their 10th true road win of the season and they've swept a road trip that has been, to put it nicely, a hellacious path of sadness over the years.

First time seeing us play this year and I like the skill of Berkely and Demaio. They seem to be big-time threats every time they touch the ball. First half was pretty decent but OMG, all those turnovers. And those finally came back to bite them in that 3rd quarter demolition. With all of the heavyweight teams in the non-conference schedule, I wonder if we'll be able to pick one or two of them off. I guess if they scale down the turnovers, it'll give them a much better chance.

If he's in the book when the game started, he's eligible to play. The live stats from that game aren't available anywhere which might show if he was listed. I would think that all players that are on the roster are placed in the book even if they're out for injury. I'd imagine someone in sports info will have that answer pretty quick.

The best part about tonite's win is now it's all in our hands. We don't have to worry about what anyone else does. It would certainly be helpful if UNCW and Hofstra lost one more time but if we take care of our own business, then we're hanging a banner and at least going to the NIT. Next stop, Charleston. I know we've all been conditioned to expect the trap door to open at some point but as I've been saying since really the beginning of the season, these guys are different. You can see it in every adverse situation they've faced in games. The only thing that has sunk them has been when the 3's and outside game hasn't been falling. If that happens again, and it will, I'd hope they'd learn from the NE game and go to the basket sooner rather than settling and trying to shoot out of the slump.

Wasn’t it the dude that was a Sports Mgmt prof? There were some knockdown, drag-out arguments on here a few years ago. I know I’m a broken record when this subject comes up but a good place to look is Grand Canyon. Find out what they do to bring people in at a city that has PLENTY of other entertainment options. They average 7k per game. I was hoping this week while in Phoenix that GCU had a home game so I could check it out for myself and maybe dig into some info.

Pretty impressive that a team playing for 2nd can find the motivation to blitz an opponent like this. Every night, a different star. Good to see Rizzuto and Gibson finding their shots again. Nolan’s return helps that immensely. CT is becoming the inside force we have craved for years. We have watched our teams get hammered inside by big men of the past and now it’s time we have one of those. Next week will determine our conference title/NIT fate. We know what needs to be done.

Great to have Nolan back. Hopefully we see a much more ‘active’ team with him in the lineup. At first blush, I’d take the 18 points. But WM can lay an egg with the best of them so I wouldn’t go anywhere near it one way or the other.

That was a tough listen today. But when your offense is predicated on hitting outside jumpers and those aren't falling, you're gonna lose. It doesn't matter how good your defensive efforts are. Allowing 58 points usually gets us on the winning end, though, the way that NE was getting those points was pretty frustrating. Bottom line is that we've been running between the raindrops with Nolan out and not having Gibson as an off-the-ball guy to catch and shoot. Gibson's foul trouble kept him off the floor and allowed NE to key more on Rizzuto and Timberlake. It stinks that the cratering happened against a winless team (again) but better now than next month since we were overdue for one. Regroup this week with the two home games and hope we can get back to 100% health.

Actual praise from someone on the Hofstra board? That's also a first. For those that remember the old America East boards in the early 2000s, those people were relentless in beating us down (in typical NY arrogant fashion). In some ways, our play deserved ridicule because we were pretty terrible but those idiots fans were adamant about kicking us out of the conference. So any time we can beat them, and especially sweep them, it's a little extra special.

Great call. CT's maturity on that end of the floor in the last few games makes everyone have to respect him and leaves just enough room for our shooters to get a cleaner look. He's also done a hell of a job being more disciplined at both ends of the floor in not racking up the moving screens and not getting lost when he hedges out on ballhandlers. We need to keep establishing him against these smaller teams, especially UNCW when we see them again.

Pretty good effort by a team playing for 2nd and going into a house of horrors. 8 true road wins this season and another situation where a previous team would have folded up the tents after Hofstra made that run at the beginning of the 2nd half. Hopefully Nolan will be back real soon and Cam can either fully heal or get a more comfortable mask. In the meantime, Hicks stepped up again and gave solid minutes and it seemed like these guys really needed those days off. That first half they seemed incredibly fresh and they got back to moving the ball on offense the way they had been doing. Now let's take care of the bottom feeder in Boston on Saturday and keep this bus rolling.

Must be nice to write off the regular season at the halfway point when you're only 1 1/2 games out of first and you have proven all season that you can win road games. Thompson's emergence as a scoring threat is a giant story. Conference teams are gonna know what we hope to do with the ball movement and putting him or Paar at the high post to act as a screener and distributor to set up the ball movement for our outside game. More games like today will help draw him more attention and I hope he has that extra sense to anticipate the doubles and to kick it to the open shooter. If we can add that wrinkle to the ball movement we've already seen on offense this season, it'll help a bunch against teams that have scouted us as well as they've should. Today's comeback was a giant one. We've been a different team these last 4 games and 21:18. A ton of that is because of different assignments due to Nolan's absence as well as Holden's struggles. After the schedule these guys have played in the last two weeks, they could have easily folded up the tents at halftime and looked forward to Sunday off. But again, this isn't the same type of team we've seen that last however number of years. They're different and they don't have the scars of past teams who may have shrunk at the potential of these 'houses of horrors'. History doesn't mean s--- to them. They just go out and ball.

And a collective meh went up from the rest of the membership.

Best win of the season thus far.