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The Aggies went on the road for a basketball conference game and lost. This... this is something we should have been copying/pasting for the past three seasons. Four road conference wins in the SEC under Coach Kennedy. Four.
1. DARI NOWKHAH IS ENTHUSIASTIC, but wrong
Dari was on the call, and holy cow he was passionate about this game. Everyone is a great shooter. The Aggies are a sound defensive team. I mean, I guess this is a life gives you lemons kind of event. The man is certainly a professional for keeping his enthusiasm high in a 40 minute display of some really poor basketball. Okay I'm just rambling here because I don't want to talk about anyone from the A&M basketball team or staff. Dari went to OU, right? What a weird time for Sooner fans with Bob Stoops going through a Mack-Brown-life-crisis. I mean when you just start firing assistants to deflect blame, you're clearly in a downhill spiral OH MY GOD THAT"S WHAT OUR BASKETBALL TEAM DID LAST YEAR. Ugh, okay, here we go.
2. WHEN I SAY OFFENSE YOU SAY DERP
Okay, I'll geek out for just a second. When you know a team can't shoot from outside, you can play a zone defense. When you know a team doesn't have any threat to penetrate 18-12 feet and score consistently, you collapse that zone. Think about it like putting 8-9 in the box on defense on 4th and 1. The offense has allllllllllllllll that space outside the tight ends to use, but you know they can't. They won't. That's what Alabama did to the Aggies tonight. The response from Billy Kennedy was, well there wasn't one. There was a stretch where we realized that we can penetrate near the free throw line and then dish to Allen, and it worked well. And then we pulled Allen out of the game. There's no excuse for that. It's that simple. Sure Allen is a freshman, but there is no excuse for pulling your leading scorer out of the game and sitting him until the end when the game is well out of reach. That's just poor rotation management, poor game management, and bad coaching. There was plenty of that on display tonight.
3. WOOSA....WOOSA...WOOSA...
Look, this guy is a really good kid and a great Aggie. I hate this. I'm truly curious if there is a more underperforming starting senior in the country. 0-2 tonight, 1 rebound, no assists, no steals, 2 turnovers, a whole lot of minutes. That's okay, if it's not working it's not working. Stop putting players out there that aren't going to put you in a position to better your chances of winning a game as the game progresses. The player management and development under Kennedy has been somewhere between poor and nonexistent. At the risk of being repetitive, there's really nothing good to say about tonight, and that says a lot in year four of a program against an NIT-caliber team.
4. WE GOT BAPTISED :(