Cowboys beat Prairie View A&M 80-75

[WyomingAg]

This was the first game I could make it too. I thought there were times that we looked like a very strong team, but I also though there were many times where we looked very sloppy, and the players looked like they didn't know where to be or what to be doing.

I think we only had maybe four 3's the whole game, and I think only 1 dunk.

Overall, it was great the pokes pulled it together and won the game. We led basically the whole game, and seemed to always have pretty good control of the game. That being said, there is still a ton of work to be done, I just hope we keep improving every game. A win is a win though and at least we are 2-0 much better then 1-1

[one-smooth-poke]

Schoyer gets his team past the perinial powerhouse "Prarie View A&M. Looked good at times? What about the second half melt down? If they win by 5, over this power house, it is only an indication of how long of a season it is gonna be. Will they have enough to get by the other power house "Johnson and Wales?"

[nirv117]

It is better than loosing to the mighty SouthWest Baptist like Utah did.

[GetRealMan]

This team is exceptionally "raw" right now and needs game experience and perhaps better conditioning. The bigs get winded easily and start slacking on defense.

Help defense underneath is severely lacking which I attribute to part confusion, part conditioning. I saw
Diakite grabbing his jersey and looking at the bench too often, then getting beat off the dribble. And no one collapsing on the backside to help out. But I think this will improve as the young players settle into their roles and get used to the pace of the game.

I'm not real concerned about the offense at this stage but the defense needs considerable improvement. We didn't have many transition points because of bad defense and sometimes just sat back and watched their guards drive uncontested to the hole. The coaches must be seeing this though, if I do, so I expect improvement over the course of the next few scrimmages .

Even Brandon can slack off on D at times. My only real gripe with him though is bringing the ball up. We must be losing 5-6 seconds when he walks it up and you would think Shroyer would want to speed the game up and not let their D catch their breath. Maybe it's for our benefit, who knows.

Anyway there's plenty of room for improvement and we'll be fine by the time conference starts and Thiam arrives.

[WyomingAg]

Schoyer gets his team past the perinial powerhouse "Prarie View A&M. Looked good at times? What about the second half melt down? If they win by 5, over this power house, it is only an indication of how long of a season it is gonna be. Will they have enough to get by the other power house "Johnson and Wales?"

Thats right they looked good at times. For about the first 10 minutes of the 1st half we had jumped out to a 10 point lead, we looked good during that time. Then for the next 20 minutes all the way till there was about 10 minutes left in the game we looked real sloppy, and bad. Then in the last 10 minutes we got our act together a little bit and got back to a 9 point lead with 3 minutes to go. Then we gave up some sloppy turnovers for easy buckets to bring it to within 1 point with less then a minute to go, but at least we pulled it out.

We only lost the lead for about 1 minute in the game. The team we had last year would have probably lost to Prairie View in that last minute. I never said that we looked great, or that I thought we would win tons of games. All I said is that we did look good during times of the game, and if we keep improving, and stop giving up the ball so much, we might become a pretty good team. Like I said there is still tons of room for improvement, I was not happy with what I saw last night, other then at least this team won the game, and we are 2-0.

[Cowduck]

Someone who was at the game, can you explain how we took 20 fewer shots than PV A&M? We outrebounded them by three, committed 5 fewer fouls, and the TO margin was only -7... that seems like a quirky stat that I hope can be explained by someone who saw the flow of the game. That seems to be the reason it was even close.

[nirv117]

Well for one we shot 43 free throws to their 22, and a lot of the fouls were on a drive to the hoop / shot, so that lowers our overall FGA. They also had 7 offensive rebounds to our 4 so that makes up a few. and lastly instead of turning the ball over they shot it. they had only 10 turnovers, while we had 17. So rough math would say 10 extra shots for them from not turning it over and offensive rebounds, and 10 less shots for us because of fouls.

Watching the game live it didn't seem like there was a big discrepancy, so I was a little surprised when I saw it in the stats.

Prairie View had a lot of hustle in them. They were always moving on offense, and played with a lot more energy at times than we did. Another thing that made the game interesting was they were a small team, almost all guards, no center. At times they had 5 guards on the floor. This created some match up problems. When we had our centers in they got beat off the dribble easily, and some of our forwards didn't handle a guard so well. If we took them out it hurt what we could do on offense. I doubt we'll see that again this season.

[GetRealMan]

Someone who was at the game, can you explain how we took 20 fewer shots than PV A&M? We outrebounded them by three, committed 5 fewer fouls, and the TO margin was only -7... that seems like a quirky stat that I hope can be explained by someone who saw the flow of the game. That seems to be the reason it was even close.

I'm not sure what you're asking but PV A&M had 11 O-Rebounds compared to our 6, which means they had almost twice as many second-chance attempts.

And with regard to field goal percentage, they took 20 more shots but made only 4 more than we did. 46 to 38 fgp in our favor, mostly because of higher shot percentage attempts underneath, which led to more fouls. If A&M had shot any better from the field, the game's theirs.

And the biggest stat of course are free throws, they beat us percentage-wise, 82 to 74 but we made fourteen more than they did, since we went to the line twice as often.

The only observation I have is the Pokes played ugly defense and A&M couldn't hit the ocean from a rowboat. And the Pokes need to settle down and stop the one on one stuff and look for higher percentage shots, which means passing the ball.

That being said, I like this team and think the talent is head and shoulders above most of McLain's teams. We just need to harness it and find some patience and consistency.

After watching the girls handle ND last night I'm convinced Shroyer should get some ideas from Joe on how to run an organized offense. The Cowgirls are good.....

[Cowduck]

Thanks for the rundown. Sounds like a typical early non-conference choppy affair.