Instant Reaction: Aggies miss tons of layups and lose

That was one of the worst displays of basketball you will ever see in one half of basketball. For the Aggies at least. The Razorbacks, meanwhile, put on one of the most impressive and fun to watch 20 minutes of a basketball game I've seen in a while. Oh Aggie Basketball.

1. Timeouts are cool

Timeouts. They can be pretty useful in college basketball. They are especially useful on the road when teams have to counter against crowd noise and the to-be-expected home team loving that is common in college hoops. They are even more useful when your team is down 21 in the first 8 or so minutes of the game. That's when the Aggies used their first timeout tonight. Some of those would have also been useful to give the refs an earful when calls were clearly starting to favor Arkansas.

2. Scurred

It was better late in the second half, but man our big guys were playing very, very scared in the first 30 minutes of the game. Portis is good, but we were just terrible from the 5-foot range tonight. Really terrible. It's a broken record, but there is zero doubt in my mind that we are the least efficient team in the history of college basketball in the paint. College players that were around before the days of dribbling being legally allowed in the game had to be better than this. This is how scared they were.

3. With all of that said

They just ran out of time (and missed entirely too many point blank shots). But seriously, that was an impressive second half from the Aggies. The kids fought back bit by bit, and showed tremendous amounts of heart out there. It would have been really easy to mail it in after the first half, but they made this thing into a ballgame with 5 minutes lef as they cut the lead to 6. You have to be proud of the fight. If only it was there for 40 minutes. The fact that this was even exciting at the end was impressive.

The officiating was bad, but let's be clear about one thing. If the Aggies make their layups they win this game and get their best win of the season. Now, there's some work to do to lock up that elusive NCAA Tournament bid.