I watched the end of regulation and the overtime periods and realized that Mississippi State only made THREE field goals in both overtimes combined!
harp away. my recollection is that i thought (and still think) that top teams (not sure there are any in the SEC) would shut down tas and/or marcus, so LSU needed a reliable third option (see Xavier game---i hope i made this point before this game:redface. temple, cj, martin or spencer didnt seem up to the task. not one of these guys is up to the task. but the D is as good as can be considering the roster deficiencies and there is value in having 4 players that can give you a 10-20 on any given night. reevaluation of the team leads me to change my view of the teams upside. they can make the FF if they get the right matchups.
Marcus went for 30 against Xavier despite having a much taller cat guarding him. We took too many quick shots in the second half of the ballgame despite relatively good interior defense and lots of forced turnovers from their PG. Spencer has shown that he can go 5-6 from 3... it just didn't happen against X. If we were to play several guard-oriented teams, I like our chances.
and tas was 5 for 17, i think. really good teams will be able to shut down one or two of your top options, so you will often need a third to pick up the slack. against X, temple, spencer, martin and johnson scored 25 combined. these four were reasonably efficient, though, so the real problem was that tas shot too much. sort of my point. no dependable third option, but he is one of four that can give you 15-20 on any given day.
