Stingy FT defense by OSU!

...that's what I'm seeing as well. We're missing the few easy shots when we can get a couple and not making our FT's...can't stay close doing that..

Simply great defense by the Beavers...probably the best we'll face all season. They only allow their opponents 58 points a game and they shoot 3's lights out on top of that.

We're going to be severely undersized in this game so we have to be able to hit a good percentage from 3 to offset the disadvantage we'll have in the interior. I expect OSU to try and bottle up TY and make the rest of the team try and beat them. Let's hope the Aggies play a whole lot better than they did in the second half of the Norfolk State game or it will be a very long night with a lopsided loss.

Ags lose 66-61. The Aggies had a 9 point lead early in the 4th quarter and managed to give it away when the Vikings turned up the defensive pressure and the Ags failed to match their intensity and that's what I think the coaches will not be happy with. You don't want to lose games where your opponent simply plays harder when it counts.

Jen must be beside herself when she watches her team turn the ball over again and again with sloppy passes almost all of which are unforced errors.

Yes it is but the the Tower Records store has been long gone.

The Tower Records store on Broadway also went out of business and was sold in 2006. The spot became a Dimple Records store until the owners retired and shut down the location in 2019, along with seven other stores. Months later, the building was demolished.

Read more at: https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article287561710.html#storylink=cpy

Irvine, Santa Barbara and San Diego are off to impressive starts this season and Irvine is looking particularly strong.

We just saw Wicked tonight and it's a great movie.

Georgia 44 Georgia Tech 42 in 8 OT's - Final

Irvine in ranked #3 in the mid-majors poll.

I think being able to play games that aren't scorching hot is a big deal for both baseball and soccer and their fans as well. Later games should bring better crowds. No one wants to sit on aluminum seats in 90-100+ temperatures. I've broiled in the full sun at a few Giants games in the past when the temperature was only in the low 80's!

I think the Sac12 folks are going "embellish" everything they can to try and keep the momentum going...

I think he's the same PA guy that does the women's game. I'm not a big fan of his style of announcing but I think he has been doing the women's games for a long time.

It was more of a typically, quiet, small Aggie crowd but, then again, there wasn't much to get excited about...

Excellent article illustrating why Lan Larison should be the Walter Peyton Award winner this year:

https://ucdavisaggies.com/news/2024/11/25/football-the-case-for-lan-larison-it-really-is-a-no-brainer.aspx

Here are some other eye opening low lights that were mentioned in Dunning"s column:

Three free throws by Niko Rocak to start the second half gave the Aggies a 36-34 advantage, but then disaster struck.

For the next 15 minutes, the Aggies had more turnovers than Betty Crocker, incredibly managing just one field goal in that span as their visitors raced away to a 53-39 lead and never looked back. Their biggest lead was 24 points entering the final minute.

...and this illustrates just how bad it got:

The Aggies made just four field goals in the second half, three of them by Connor Sevilla who led UCD with 15 points.

I'm going to assume that we won't see anything this poor again this season and that the second half last night was just one of those games that became a slow-motion train wreck for the Aggies. However, this team has some glaring weaknesses and I'm not sure where the help is going to come from.

By the way, Bob Dunning's Substack column, The Wary One, is well worth $5 a month to subscribe. His write ups following Aggie basketball and football games are usually online within a few hours after the game and he covers other Aggie sports as well. Of course, he keeps you up-to-date on things happening in the community too with his keen, wry sense of humor.

https://www.thewaryone.com

We left with about 3 minutes to go. We like to listen to the post-game, radio interview with Les after each game on the drive back to Sac but we can't seem to find the radio station that carries the Aggie game when KHTK 1140 AM is doing the Kings game. So we didn't get to hear Les but Bob Dunning had some quotes from Les in his Substack column:

"Our response was just not very good," said Aggie head coach Jim Les about Norfolk's second-half dominance.

"Instead of staying together as a team, we kind of splintered, but give them credit, they took advantage. That's a very good team that will probably win their conference and play in the NCAA tournament."

"It was their quickness and our carelessness," Les added.

"I hoped we would have put up a better fight, but this game will humble you."

https://www.thewaryone.com/p/norfolk-state-uses-second-half-burst?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2582284&post_id=152178784&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=31ratq&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

I don't disagree that the Spartans took TY out of his game, but the whole team contributed to the prat fall that was tonight with 17 turnovers in addition to TY's 6. — Toke69

I think we are saying essentially the same thing, Toke. We are going to struggle mightily on offense if we can't get much offensive production from other players when teams are effective in slowing down TY. Last year we had Pepper and TY and that was a double barreled offensive punch along with Milling as well so, if either Pepper or TY was off their game, we didn't fall off much offensively. This year, we don't seem to have that kind of offensive support for TY so teams are going to make things as difficult as possible for him like NSU did tonight with the thinking that the Ags won't be able to make up for his loss of scoring if they slow him down.

The second half of this game was perhaps the poorest half of basketball I've seen an Aggie team play in quite a while. NSU had the Aggies frustrated and discombobulated...totally out of sync.

NSU exposed some glaring problems for the Ags tonight and future opponents who see the tape of this game will try and play us in a similar way. They essentially took TY out of the game by hounding him on defense and clogging up the middle so he couldn't drive the ball to the hoop. They played him very physical and, the more frustrated he became, the more he pressed and turned the ball over. TY has 14 TO's in the last two games and the Ags as a whole had 23 TO's tonight. GCU did the same thing in the second half but several other Ags filled in for the loss of his offense. They didn't do that tonight.

Teams are going to do whatever it takes to stop TY and, if they do and nobody else offers much of an offensive punch, we're going to struggle to win games. Teams are also going to try and make us beat them from the outside also because we have not shown that we shoot well from the perimeter. We also don't have help for Rocak with Borra and Mani injured and, so far, we've seen very little from the 4 transfers that Les brought in this year so depth appears to be an issue too.

It's early in the season and we've seen the Ags play really well at GCU followed by this mess tonight. So I hope this was just a bad night for the Aggies and Les gets things straightened out soon.