SMU
 

Thursday, January 6th, 2022
9:30 PM
Fifth Third Arena
ESPN2

The Mustangs (11-3, 2-0, NET #66, KenPom #62) come to town for a nationally televised broadcast on the backs of an 8-game winning streak.

They are led by 4th-year PG and early AAC POY candidate, Kendric Davis, who is averaging 21.5 ppg, 5 rpg, and 5.5 apg on an impressive 49/39/89 shooting line.

SMU ranks 35th in KenPom's AdjO rankings and haven't had many weaknesses exploited in their team, although KenPom only ranks their current SOS as the 261st toughest in the country (ours is #280 for comparison).

Despite our recent struggles, we have beaten SMU 8 consecutive times and have never lost to the Mustangs at home.

An interesting battle in this one will be if we can force SMU to take midrange shots. Less than 19% of their attempts come from midrange, but we force our opponents to take more than 35%.

They are pretty balanced overall. A couple areas of weakness are having a lot of shots blocked because they attack the rim so much and relatively poor defensive rebounding. They also don't force a lot of turnovers, so we should be patient on offense and work for a high percentage shot (LOL).

As always with this team I just want to see some evidence that we are capable of running an offense. Right now our starting backcourt trio each have effective field goal percentages under 43%. That's awful. It's like we're running three Trevor Moores out there.

We're 2-point favorites.

That's surprising given recent results, but hopefully a sign that we're not too far from turning things around.

That is very surprising. Our trend is down and theirs is way up. Their last 6 games have been pretty good. I would rank them in the top 40 or so over their last 6. And I would rank us around 125-150.

This is a game an SMU fans should put some money on. I don't bet against the Bearcats. Those spreads are factoring in our first 5 games which we haven't looked like since then. Meanwhile SMU struggled early and now looks to be humming along.

All I can say is we better make some shots. SMU should be favored by around 5 or so IMO.

If I were betting, I'd definitely take SMU straight up. Maybe we turn it around tonight, but I'm not expecting it.

We are looking good so far, running the make shots offense and playing pretty tight defense.

Clearly playing with a purpose tonight. Let's see how long this energy keeps up.

Davenport takes a questionable three and Newman follows it up with a horrible one the next possession. We've been running good offense most of the game, can't backslide into jacking up bad threes.

Defensively we are playing a lot tighter than usual. It's led to us getting beat on some back-cuts and drives, but it has also led to some TO's and seems to have SMU out of rhythm. Kendrick Davis has bailed SMU out at the end of the shot clock a couple of times by making extremely high difficulty shots.

Miller has been quicker to pull guys. He pulled Newman for the aforementioned terrible three and shortly after pulled Lakhin for a bad TO. Seems like he's decided to not let them play quite so much.

Aside from Davenport (who has misses a pair of wide open threes), we are shooting well from 3. Davenport is out most consistent shooter though, he will start making those if the keep leaving him open.

Huge 3s by Saunders and DeJulius after we went quite a while without hitting one.

Defense has been quite stellar for the past 9 minutes.