I will be writing more about basketball as the season progresses and I get to see the team play a lot more. That should occur in conference play when Raycom will be putting our beloved team on television regularly. In the meantime, I am just going to let Poseur talk about the debacle from earlier this week. It seems the Utah athletic department has the SEC's number in the last 7 days.
I am here to talk about the impending start to the SEC schedule. LSU takes on Bama at 12:30pm on Raycom Sports on Sunday. I live in Tuscaloosa, and I am thinking about trying to attend the game. I think I could get tickets for cheap outside Coleman Colisseum, but I would want to take Little Miss ATVS with me, and I'm not sure she can really sit still through a basketball game or allow me to appreciate it.
Living here in Tuscaloosa, I am privy to the general feeling of Tide fans, and when it comes to basketball their general feelings are not pretty. There were loud calls for Mark Gottfried's firing after last season in which they went 16-15 and 5-11 in the SEC. They won 1 road game the entire year, and it was not a conference game. The coach's wife got into a heated confrontation with a local radio talk show host during a game. It was ugly.
This year has not been any better. They are 10-4, including a loss to Mercer, and closer-than-they-should-be wins over Alabama A&M, Yale, and Tennessee State. In other words, their season is going about like our season is going, except with a bad loss thrown in. We've also had closer-than-they-should-be wins over McNeese and ULL. Bama doesn't have the excitement of a new coach, and they also do not really have a good win. Their best win is against Georgia Tech, who looks pretty mediocre if you ask me.
There has already been murmuring of Mark Gottfried not lasting out the season, and the only reason those murmurings haven't gotten louder is because the football team has kept the fan base distracted. No more.
So while Bama is no great shakes on the basketball court, neither is LSU really, and the game is being played in Tuscaloosa. Still, if we're going to have any success on the hard court this season, this is the kind of game we have to win. This is not a good team.
What's more, this is not a team with an inside presence. Their top 3 scorers are all guards, and they only have two forwards scoring more than 5 points per game. Their tallest players are 6'9" and none of them average more than 24 minutes per game, and they tend to get in a bit of foul trouble. Like Georgia Tech in the Peach Bowl, this is not a team that is well-positioned to exploit our weaknesses.
In other words, this is a game we should win. I'm not saying we will win it, but we should. If we don't, we are well behind the 8-ball when it comes to competing in the conference. Every SEC West team is flawed, and whoever can correct or compensate for their flaws will win it.