Most Disappointing Loss in Many Years for Men’s Hoops

The loss to Mason yesterday bummed us out significantly more than any game we can recall in at least the last decade.  The expectations were huge, the Convo was legit, and the effort, as it has almost all season, was there.  And to top it off, nothing that happened yesterday can be fairly pinned on our usual donkey, Coach Brady.

Gotta get over the small hump and deal with the big one in March

Here are just a few of a long list of things yesterday that Coach Brady was in no way responsible for: Hideous, ghastly free throw shooting, committing horrendous turnovers on the first three possessions of the game and digging yourself a hole they never fully climbed out of, AJ Davis’ shot selection.

Speaking of officiating, let us first note that it was friggin’ joke both ways.  CAA commish Tom Yeager was in attendance and his officials looked even worse than his handling of a sinking league.  He should be embarrassed.  Because the Dukes were trailing down the stretch, the ridiculous calls against them, including the fact the game was clinched on a chicken-shit call even Sherrod Wright disagreed with on the Goins flagrant, seemed more outrageous to JMU fans, but I think it’s fair to say if we were GMCC fans (I threw up in my mouth typing that), we’d be equally disgusted.  The only way you dealt with something worse than the officials in that game yesterday is if your pet or a relative died or you were forced to drink a Windex-blue Mad Dog 20/20 that had been heated in the microwave.

But what does it all mean:  We hope not a damned thing!  The one thing that scares us is that the students seemed to buy into yesterday’s game and we can only hope the disappointment doesn’t turn them off the rest of the way.  But we need to remind ourselves the same thing we’ve been reminding you all season – in this shitty league with no at-large selections coming, the only thing that matters is what happens between March 9th and 11th in Richmond.  JMU is still in second place and all you’d really like is to be on the 2 or 3 line so you can avoid a getting-healthy Drexel team on Day 1.  The big thing this week will be to see if the squad can learn from their past mistake.  Clearly the team takes Mason seriously and considers it a marker for their own performance.  When they were disappointed in losing to Mason the first time, they kept wallowing in their own self-pity and promptly laid the biggest egg of the season at Towson.  Will they learn from that game, get up off the deck, and take at least the first step at dealing with a team that’s been a huge thorn in their side in W&M this week.  First get over the inexplicable W&M hump, then get back on track and we’ll deal with Mason when it matters.