Final: Bradley 55 Loyola 38

[bigjimmy]

Can you feel it? Starting to get goosebumps? ARE YOU READY ? We're less than 24 hours away from the biggest thing to happen to Peoria since the Plaza Tires Uniroyal Tire Lady and the opening of Chick-Fil-A. What's it's name going to be? Is it a he or a she? Is it going to be one color or a cornucopia of colors? The anticipation to the fireworks display to unveil the new mascot is spine tingling. There's something else going on that night, right?

[bigjimmy]

But seriously folks. This is a must win against a team we should beat by double digits. So lest just go out there and do it.

[Da Coach]

Bradley had a very good 2nd half to finally blow open a really ugly game. BU lead 19-17 at halftime, with both teams shooing well under 30%. But much better energy and shooting allowed Bradley to pull out to as much as a 20 point lead late in the game, and win 55-38.

Final stats-

http://stats.statbroadcast.com/broadcast/?id=31013

BU ended up shooting 38%, and Loyola just 26.5%. Loyola was 1-18 from three.

Dave Snell mentioned that this was the 26th anniversary of the game in which Hersey Hawkins scored 63 points (vs. Detroit 2/22/8. That is 8 more points than the entire Bradley team scored tonight, and 25 more than Loyola scored. Hersey had 36 points in the first half of that game, which is equal to what both teams combined scored in the first half tonight!

[Buesch N Chips]

Agreed. I believe my post above explains some of this issue.

Loyola sucked tonight. We played well in the second half, and those officials must not have gotten the memo on the new rules. A lot of no calls.

[Da Coach]

I am always happy with a win, but I would like to have heard what Porter Moser said in the Loyola locker room after the game. Yes, Loyola played as bad as just about any team I can ever recall seeing at Carver Arena. But when Bradley pulled away to start the 2nd half, it looked like they just quit. Especially a couple of their better players Christian Thomas and Milton Doyle acted like they did not care what happened, and they could not wait to get out of there and go home. They were bad. Maybe the MVC made a big mistake.

[lefty]

I am always happy with a win, but I would like to have heard what Porter Moser said in the Loyola locker room after the game. Yes, Loyola played as bad as just about any team I can ever recall seeing at Carver Arena. But when Bradley pulled away to start the 2nd half, it looked like they just quit. Especially a couple of their better players Christian Thomas and Milton Doyle acted like they did not care what happened, and they could not wait to get out of there and go home. They were bad. Maybe the MVC made a big mistake.

I thought so too DC??¦..and Jeff White as well in the last 10 minutes. He might have been pressing for his hometown??¦but watching him at the scorer's table it sure didn't seem like he cared about going in

[BU-Bball]

I was shocked to see Moser leave his starters in til the very end and keep the press on. When Geno emptied the bench with 2 plus minutes left, I expected Moser to do the same.

[Big Mike]

That first half might have been the worst half I've witnessed in Carver Arena....finally watched a team worse than BU in the paint! Even though they out-rebounded the Braves pretty good!

[Da Coach]

That first half might have been the worst half I've witnessed in Carver Arena....finally watched a team worse than BU in the paint! Even though they out-rebounded the Braves pretty good!

They also outscored Bradley with points in the paint 24-20, which tells you Bradley wasn't very good either.

Here is the game story from BUBraves.com

http://www.bradleybraves.com/ViewArticle.dbml?SPID=1498&DB_OEM_ID=3400&ATCLID=209414732

and the official box score-

http://www.bradleybraves.com/pdf9/2646734.pdf?ATCLID=209414732&SPSID=25965&SPID=1498&DB_LANG=C&DB_OEM_ID=3400

Attendance was 8,931, which is the highest announced attendance of the year.

[wizard1]

Final: Bradley 55 Loyola 38

Both teams stunk the place up but Loyola was/is clearly the far worse of the two. I can't recall seeing a worse team in Carver. The game was terrible to watch.
On the positive side...I really like KaBoom...The new mascot is great! Also, it was really good to see the student turnout. We need more of this.
Wiz

[bigjimmy]

It seemed like both teams were in an offensive fog in the 1st half, kind of like Carver Arena was for the whole game. The 2nd half was a much better effort on the offensive end as we actually ran some isolation plays in the lane and we were just in a much better flow. Defense was outstanding all night as this was the first we held an opponent under 40 since we beat UNI 80-39 back on February 5, 2000. This is the kind of effort that we're going to have to do on Tuesday night if we're going to have any kind of chance to be competitive against Wichita. Almost 9,000 tickets sold for this game and most of them came, especially the students who had their section filled and making noise. They will need to bring it like that on Tuesday. I also thought it was pretty cool having the starting line up go through the student section though if you keep doing it you better hope there's actual students to go through. A great stage for our seniors for their last home game, on ESPN 2 against an undefeated opponent. Let's rock the house.

[tornado]

Yeah - Loyola really played bad - simply do not have much of anything on offense.
Walt was 1-10 in the first half but 4-8 in the 2nd half...much better.
Our players played with a lot of energy, maybe the big crowd and large student section had something to do with it - if that's the case - then the 3 years of smaller crowds have hurt us more than just the financial end of it.
Now we have a team coming in Tuesday that is likely to be ranked #2 - let's see it we can sustain the energy and the crowd.

A team ranked that high has never come into Carver Arena - but a #2 ranked team did play at BU in the old Fieldhouse in January of 1982 - and we beat them!!

[lefty]

Both teams stunk the place up but Loyola was/is clearly the far worse of the two. I can't recall seeing a worse team in Carver. The game was terrible to watch.
On the positive side...I really like KaBoom...The new mascot is great! Also, it was really good to see the student turnout. We need more of this.
Wiz

ISUred was a pretty close second though

[Da Coach]

Bradley's RPI fell back down to 251 after playing Loyola last night. It should rise a little by playing Wichita State, and would jump a lot if Bradley could beat WSU. But without such an upset, it looks like the final RPI will end somewhere around 245-250.

The RPI for the last 35 years is listed in the 3rd column from the right-

http://www.bbstate.com/teams/BRAD/history

[bula-bloom]

???We played all Division I teams and we??™re barely behind ??™em (in SOS),??? Ford said. ???If we subbed out one of the lower-ranked Division I teams we played for a Division II, we??™d have a higher strength of schedule. It would be a little unfortunate if we lost the tiebreaker because we played all Division Is and somebody else didn??™t. But in the end, we had our chance to sweep SIU (and earn the automatic tiebreaker) and we didn??™t do it.???[/B][/I]

Amazingly, we have been reduced to complaining about another MVC bottom dweller team having played a Division II team, and we are blaming for possibly costing us a chance to avoid a Thursday play-in game!

.

If geno was quoted accurately and he actually said this, it's really sad! We live in a world where others are always blamed - the bottom line is if there were a few more wins, none of this would matter. I'm surprised Geno didn't blame Jacksonville State or Texas Pan American (my vote for the worse team at Carver this year) for not being better.

Can you imagine a Coach K, Izzo, Beilein, Matta, dozens of other good coaches getting this petty?

One has to question his "competitive mindset" -- I know when I lose, I blame myself -- theres always something I could have done to win that I didn't do. In truth there's a lot of ways he could have avoided the play in Thursday.

BTW, we beat Upper Iowa (a Div II team) because they forgot to stop Walt Lemon on a last minute fullcourt drive, otherwise they would have won. What if we would have lost to the "div II opponent" Geno would have scheduled to replace the DIV I team? I'm sure there would have been another excuse coming.