Memphis Roar

In a game that shouldn’t have been close against a team that shouldn’t have even been there Memphis pulled out a hard fought 81-70 victory against the Cal State Northridge Matadors. With 10 minutes to go in the game the Matadors took a 6 point lead. The crowd was very pro-Matador and it appeared that the Tigers were on their way to being the 5th No.2 seed to lose to a 15 seed. What happened next was that the Tigers looked down at their new shoes and saw RTL for the first time. They ramped up their defense. Tyreke got involved and Sallie continued raining 3’s. Memphis was then up by 10 and the game was over.

Found
Roburt Sallie made a NCAA opening round tourney record 10 three pointers. His stats were 35 points, 12-17 FG, 10-15 3Pt, 4 rebounds, 3 steals, 1 block and an assist. If it weren’t for a Big 12 rule Sallie would be playing for Nebraska and we would be packing our bags and heading home.

Lost
There were several noticeable absences in this game. Missing persons number one was the Tiger defense. Memphis allowed 70 points for the first time since January 3rd. The Tiger defense was uncharacteristically slow on switching off screens, let CSUN’s guards get repeatedly to the rim and had their worst defensive showing of the game.

Missing person number 2 was the Dribble Drive Motion offense aka “The Memphis Attack”. Until very late in the game the Tiger offense mostly consisted of throwing the ball around and shooting from outside.

Missing person number 3 was Doneal Mack shooting 0-7 from the field including 4 three pointers, 1-3 from the foul line, 3 turnovers and 1 rebound.

Missing person number 4 was Shawn Taggart. After starting off the game with 6 points he only scored 2 points after that.

It was ugly. We won. We move on to play again. We also hope that we have gotten the bad game out of our system for now. One can’t help but wonder if Taggart and Tyreke were weaker than normal after having the flu earlier in the week. Let’s hope that we get bit with another type of bug, the NCAA tournament bug in our next game Saturday against Maryland.