The Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Loss

The JMU Dukes traveled 693 miles South to lose to a basketball game to a team from 513 miles to the North in the opening round of the Holiday Classic at the University of South Florida. And the inefficiency wasn’t even the worst part of it. The worst part was that the team they lost to, the Rhode Island Rams, was 1-11 entering the game. And they were without their leading scorer, Jamal Wilson, who was recently dismissed from the team. And this is not a case of Rhode Island being a solid 1-11 if their even is such a thing. They have been every bit as bad as their record indicates. And JMU got blown out by the score of 79-60.

This was a game that everyone expected to be a laugher and it was. We just all expected it would be the Dukes who were laughing. I certainly wasn’t laughing. I was behaving like a jackass shaking my fists and cursing to myself as a listened to the game online. Personally speaking, it was a bit of a lowpoint. The only saving grace was that I’ve been watching this Baylor vs Washington football game, so my eyes were spared from JMU basketball carnage.

It’s usually tough to analyze things in depth based solely on the audio call. There isn’t much to analyze about this one though. JMU just got flat out beaten. Humpty Hitchens wasn’t at full strength due to a bought with the flu. That wasn’t why JMU lost though. They lost because they played sloppy basketball, shot poorly, didn’t rebound well enough, missed too many free throws in the second half, and failed to take advantage of multiple opportunities to get back in the game. Even when URI got called for a flagrant foul and gave the Dukes a chance to close to single-digits with plenty of time left, JMU couldn’t come through. Julius Wells went 1 for 8. Devon Moore was 2 for 9. AJ was 3 for 9. They let URI shoot 50% from the field. They turned it over 19 times. They got outrebounded 38-25. It just wasn’t the Dukes’ night.

If you search for positives hard enough, you’re bound to find them though, right? Well, tonight JMU at least was going to the basket in the second half instead of forcing jumpers. They were getting to the line as a result. They just couldn’t get the shots to fall. And freshman Arman Marks had a decent game, with 10 points on 4-4 shooting. That’s about it though.

JMU will get a chance to put this one behind them tomorrow in the tournament’s consolation game against a 4-7 Stetson team. They follow that up with a game at home against ODU on Monday. If they pull it together and defeat the Monarchs, we can all pretend this little setback never happened.