They'll be tough and I think it will be a challenging game for the Aggies. We've seen some improvement with the Ags recently and I hope that continues.

Odds show us as 6.5 point favorites with 77% chance of winning, and 48% chance of covering. As Toke said, hard to get a read on them with their array of opponents. Plus they’ve been traveling are awhile. These early season OOC games are always a mystery.

This should be interesting. GCU beat Norfolk by 18.

Starting to look like a trap game. Aggies seem kind of confused tonight at both ends. Being out shot, out-rebounded, out-assisted and out-hustled.

Oh man. I hope TY is ok!

TY got injured on a freak fall and was in some significant pain.

It doesn't look good. Might be an abdominal strain. This game seems a bit like the Idaho game. Vandals came out really hot from 3 and had the lead at the half, but cooled off and we won. Spartans started off hot but cooled off before the half.

He was pounding his hand on the court in frustration, as though he knew it was a bad injury. He was keeled over as he went up the stairs.

He slipped and fell flat on his face…weird fall…definitely hurt…

TY is back and working out.

Whew!!

TY is moving well. This is an ugly game. The teams have combined for 23 turnovers and 21 fouls with only 4 minutes gone in the second half. I can see Norfolk State being worn out, but the first tem that straightens things out should win.

Poor Niko is the only big guy we have. He’s not getting much rest

18 turnovers. The Ags playing like my old intramural team that went 0-6!

Aggies have been out played on both ends of the court so far in the second half.

Ags down 16…really playing poorly …20 T0’s and counting.

Tough night for me and my father in law. USF and CU got blown out, and the Nuggets are getting blown out. Let's go Warriors?

Norfolk State straightened it out and embarrassed UC Davis. Or maybe the Ags embarrassed themselves. Clearly, the Grand Canyon game wasn't a turning point for this team. I'm inclined to chalk it off as a bad night. What else can one say when their second half resulted in as many turnovers as the first half. Troubling too that they only hit 69% of their free throws. Not going to get any easier as they travel to Corvallis after Thanksgiving.

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.

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. NSU had twice as many assists. Sevilla was the only one who had a good night. But getting back to TY, Bob Williams made the excellent point that, with Eli Pepper gone, the burden of leadership falls on TY. I don't know that anyone on the team or the coaching staff pushes that role, but tonight's performance suggests that he feels it and presses too hard. A key to the season is whether he can grow into that role or have the team take some of the load off of him, something a grad student like Rocak could do.

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.

I ended up leaving early. The Spartans were throwing a lot of elbows. We’re missing big guys.

That second half was ugly. We made a nice run before the half to take the lead, finally playing in rhythm on both ends. Then, I’m not sure what happened. They were very physical which, surprisingly, seemed to affect us mentally - especially TY. There was a 5 minute or so stretch where it didn’t seem like we got a shot and they got hot, turning a 2 point lead into a 12 point deficit in no time. When we got the ball inside, we couldn’t get up a shot or lost the ball - their length and ability to leap seem to intimidate us a bit.

We obviously go as TY goes, and he was off all night. Sevilla and Leo both had solid stretches, but nobody else seemed to contribute. Rocek is going to have a tough go with basically no help down low. A team with athletic bigger guys, like last night, will get easy buckets and open up the outside.

Maybe Mani gets back out there and contributes; else, we’re gonna have many nights that look like that.

BTW, I don’t remember seeing Kevin Nocek on the bench….I’m blaming the loss on his absence (unless I just missed him!).

I didn’t hear/read post game comments - Les couldn’t have been pleased

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

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

Coach Nosek was not at the game. The PA announcer before the game said he was MIA.

Really rough second half. As with a lot of Aggie teams from the past, the difference between a great game (vs GCU) and a terrible one (last night) is razor thin. Give Norfolk credit, they moved the ball on offense, hit open shots, and played with a very controlled energy. The ags looked very tentative on both sides of the ball.

I'm wondering if it's time to alter the starting lineup a bit. Lose is a decent defender and plays hard, but he's limited on offense, to the point where it almost feels like it's 4 on 5. I know we've had defensive "stoppers" in the past that don't look to score much (Adebayo and Michael Onyebalu come to mind), but both could contribute on offense when left open (Ade could finish around the rim when he had his confidence going, and Michael developed a pretty solid 3 point shot). Teams have sloughed off Sione so much (basically begging him to shoot), which allows them to get into our passing lanes, resulting in not just steals but in keeping us out of a nice offensive flow. Daugherty seems to be getting his shot back a bit and is also a pretty tough on ball defender, or maybe Cooper (though he seems to be needed to replace Tomba on the front court). Not saying that Lose needs to score 10 a game, but just hit the occasional open 3, or even consistently get fouled on drives to the basic. Anything that would force the defense to take him seriously.

It's important to give Norfolk State some credit. Their coach is outstanding and his game plan was perfect, not that the Ags poor play didn't help. The players have to be in great condition to have gone through a long road trip and to have had enough energy to play well through the entire game in front of a hostile (thought not very large) crowd.

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

the PA was really awful. Hope he was just a fill in.