Pitchin' with Pritch: Taking in the season openers
I had the opportunity to go watch the Husker men’s basketball team play in their opener against Mississippi Valley State last week in Lincoln.
The Huskers are rumored to be a contender for the NCAA tournament this year and a force in the Big 10. I hope they are but it would be difficult to judge a whole lot from the opening game.
The Husker men set the school record for margin of victory in either 1906 or 1907, with an 82-8 win over Crete. I don’t know if that was Crete High School or Doane College or what, but if Doane or Crete High would schedule Mississippi Valley State, I might be inclined to take either of the two Nebraska schools and give points. The Huskers almost broke that record in their season opener when they hung a 106-37 loss on the visitors. It was a 55-13 margin at half and in the second half the margin was 51-24.
The Delta Devils shot 8 percent from the field the first half. After that it didn’t really make much difference what they did or what the Huskers did, because the sides were not even. I don’t know if the visitors got a big pay out to come to Lincoln or not, but I am not too sure the game did either team a whole lot of good.
It did give the NU coaches a chance to see every player they had suited up get on the floor to play more than just a few minutes. I didn’t think I had ever heard of Mississippi State, but I did find their program is not real strong at the moment.
I went through some materials and found out they played the Huskers in 2015. One ranking service has the Delta Devils ranked 348 out of 351. They have lost to two NAIA schools already this season.
This week on Sunday, the Huskers had their second game and it was against Southeastern Louisiana, again at Pinnacle Bank Arena but also on TV. Our tickets were given to my son and oldest grandson and they got to see almost a carbon copy of last week’s game.
It started a little differently because the visitors took an early lead, but it didn’t last very long after the Huskers went on a 22-0 run to close out the first half and win the game 87-35.
The Huskers did a lot of good things in the game. They shot well, rebounded and played pretty well on defense and I thought they looked better than they did last week. Nebraska was 17 of 22 from the free-throw while SE Louisiana was 2-4.
Did the visitors get homered? I think their problem was they were a tad bit slower than the Huskers. They played hard, but the Huskers were bigger, faster and truly did play better defense than SEL played offense. The Huskers had six players in double figures, which I think a coach would be really happy about. I am sure Coach Miles is happy about it.
The season will get tougher and I am sure Coach Miles and the players know that. It will pick up a lot this week when on Wednesday the Huskers will host Seaton Hall. I think the coaching staff will have a much better idea of where the team is early in the season after this game.
I also watched Creighton play on TV Sunday and they went on a late scoring spree to win their game. I enjoy watching the Bluejays play also. Coach Greg McDermott has done a great job at Creighton. They play a good schedule and play really well most of the time.
Another team that played well this past week was Nebraska Wesleyan. They are ranked No. 1 in their division of NAIA schools and are the defending national champions. They played Grinnell at Lincoln and won the game 143-90 in the season home opener. That is a lot of scoring and one would think not a lot of defense, but sometimes teams do things and if they don’t do them well they can give up bunches of points.
Apparently Grinnell shot and missed a lot of three pointers and ended up giving up a lot of fast-break points. It is interesting that the 143 points Wesleyan scored wasn’t a school record, and no they didn’t play Crete way back when. They missed tying the school record of 144 set last year.
Won’t be long until the high school teams get started and all of a sudden it will be my favorite time of the year.