At yesterday's game with UF

[EagleDore]

I attended yesterday's game at UF with my son, a senior there. We sat on the lower deck at the end behind our offense side in the 2nd half. It was a great game and had some interesting aspects.

- The first foul didn't come until after 13 minutes of play. I can't ever remember a college game where no fouls were called for the 1st 13 min. The refs were letting them play, and despite some minor bumps I think it was fair to let them play. Refs let some body contact pass, especially on the bigs, but I think this was fine.

- Everyone knows Liam was on fire, right from the start. I was ready to see how we matched up with Castleton, and we did, well. 1st half D on him was really good. Castleton is a talented scorer and a good defender. He's going to get his points. His shots frequently "bounce well" and go into the basket, but we kept him from being able to take over the game. Liam had at least two "blocks & steals" on Castleton shots...QMB may have had another. We didn't have to double down on Castleton and that was nice too. We out rebounded UF.

- My main takeaway is on our offense. We looked to be moving the ball better, getting and taking better shots overall and playing very controlled for the most part. I think this benefits us greatly. Manjon pentrating can take and get a decent layup if there or he can effectively dish it off to the outside. Liam was getting a lot of touches, setting screens and moving well. The other team's big now has to come out to guard him and that opens up other options. When we play like this, we can have a guy like Trey spot up and get the open looks he needs. We shot 52% from the 3! While Lawrence didn't score a lot Thomas did, and coach played Thomas a lot so he knew something. Guys are stepping in to fill the scoring if one scorer is heavily defended or not hot. If we can keep up this type of offense we'll be hard to play down the stretch. Is this the team buying into CJS's philosophy?

I'd describe the O'Dome as raucous, but noise wasn't deafening or anything like that.

[3rdFloorDyer]

Your take on number of Vandy fans there?

[EagleDore]

Your take on number of Vandy fans there?

20-ish - 30? Not many that I could see. I was there 30 minutes prior in my seats and didn't see hardly any. I was also near the VU bench, and only a few (family?) behind the bench. After the game several materialized near the tunnel to the locker room. We high fived the team and coach and waited for Liam.

[oakparkDore]

Did anyone chant “Just Like Football!”

[Jason94]

I attended yesterday's game at UF with my son, a senior there. We sat on the lower deck at the end behind our offense side in the 2nd half. It was a great game and had some interesting aspects.

- The first foul didn't come until after 13 minutes of play. I can't ever remember a college game where no fouls were called for the 1st 13 min. The refs were letting them play, and despite some minor bumps I think it was fair to let them play. Refs let some body contact pass, especially on the bigs, but I think this was fine.

- Everyone knows Liam was on fire, right from the start. I was ready to see how we matched up with Castleton, and we did, well. 1st half D on him was really good. Castleton is a talented scorer and a good defender. He's going to get his points. His shots frequently "bounce well" and go into the basket, but we kept him from being able to take over the game. Liam had at least two "blocks & steals" on Castleton shots...QMB may have had another. We didn't have to double down on Castleton and that was nice too. We out rebounded UF.

- My main takeaway is on our offense. We looked to be moving the ball better, getting and taking better shots overall and playing very controlled for the most part. I think this benefits us greatly. Manjon pentrating can take and get a decent layup if there or he can effectively dish it off to the outside. Liam was getting a lot of touches, setting screens and moving well. The other team's big now has to come out to guard him and that opens up other options. When we play like this, we can have a guy like Trey spot up and get the open looks he needs. We shot 52% from the 3! While Lawrence didn't score a lot Thomas did, and coach played Thomas a lot so he knew something. Guys are stepping in to fill the scoring if one scorer is heavily defended or not hot. If we can keep up this type of offense we'll be hard to play down the stretch. Is this the team buying into CJS's philosophy?

I'd describe the O'Dome as raucous, but noise wasn't deafening or anything like that.

I was only able to watch the 2nd half of the game (took my daughter for her first day to work and for her driving test) but Robbins defense against Castleton was impressive. Robbins is probably the best post player in the SEC right now, and statistically is having as good a season as we've seen from a center in quite a while. The school record for blocks in a season is 87 and Robbins is at 64 despite having missed four games and only played 21 compared to the 34 that Festus played in 2011. Robbins could break the record if he gets 8 more games at this pace, and we are pretty much guaranteed to play 7 more.

When we are hitting over 50% of our threes our offense looks really good because we have a post presence who is very difficult to stop. Trey was for sure overdue for hitting them, as he is not a 31% three point shooter and it isn't like he's been forcing his threes. He's just missed a whole lot of wide open looks this season and for the most part they can be considered "good shots", but when he isn't doing much else he can be a drag on the team overall.

What is funny is that UF is a very good defensive team and a mediocre offensive team. Yet we scored 88 points but allowed 80. We are the opposite in that we have a good offense but our defense is average for D1 teams and bad for power conference teams. How it can be so bad when we have a shot blocking center who is 2nd in the nation in shot block % is largely due to how often our guards get beat off the dribble, which is quite often. The fouls I saw were largely due to Liam having to cover a guard who beat his man, and not primarily due to his fouling Castleton. It was a good thing that UF shot the ball so poorly from three as they did, as even shooting 20% from three would have made it a very tight game. This is probably the one area that might doom us in the end. We had a legitimately good defense last season and the major difference is the swap out of minutes from Pippen and Chatman to Manjon, Lawrence and Thomas. Lawrence should be a good defender but I don't think he moves his feet well enough and Manjon and Thomas are both very short.

The season will basically come down to how well we shoot from outside down the stretch. In our wins we've hit 44% of our threes. In our losses we've shot 24.7% from three. We've also taken a lot more threes in our losses - 27.7 in our losses to 21.3 in our wins. To be fair 4 of the 6 losses were with Liam out and the 1st game back against Bama (which was a whole different level). But the formula is selective three point shooting which tends to result in better accuracy.