Dukes Beats the Dukes

Georgia State’s Joe Dukes poured in 25 points to lead the Panthers to a 77-72 victory over JMU. This one cuts especially deep for me. You see, I used to live in Atlanta and now I’m never going to hear the end of it from all of the Georgia State fans I know. Just kidding. Georgia State has no fans. Seriously. No fans at all. I’m not even sure if Georgia State has full time students.

So, while it’s nice that JMU fans aren’t going to be forced to suffer abuse from Georgia State fans, this is a terrible loss. Losing to Georgia State earlier at home was awful, but we wrote it off because those were the “Pre-Denzel Dukes”. Tonight, Denzel was in the lineup, and he was dominating, and JMU still didn’t win. Bowles did all he could to keep his team in the game and he finished with 34 points and 9 boards. Julius Wells had 18 points. No other Duke scored more than 9 points.

There really isn’t much to be said at this point. There is no point trying to break down what went wrong or explain why the Dukes lost. The fact is that even with a depleted roster, JMU is talented enough that the Dukes should be losing games to the likes of Georgia State, UNCW, and Towson. It’s the same old thing we’ve been saying all season. This team is just inconsistent in every way possible. Until Coach Brady gets them to string together a couple results like last Saturday’s win over VCU (or even just string together a couple strong efforts), this team just isn’t going to separate itself from the bottom of the CAA. Denzel is a beast though. So we got that going for us, which is nice.