This is the big one for Aggie basketball fans. First place UC Irvine comes to the Pavilion tonight at 8 pm for a nationally televised ESPN game with the Aggies. The Ags lost to the Anteaters 71-69 in OT in their first conference game of the season back on January 10th and the Aggies would like nothing better than to take down the Eaters in front of what is sure to be the biggest crowd of the year in the Pavilion.
There is still now word as to whether or not TJ Shorts II will be able to play for the Aggies tonight but Aggie fans have their fingers crossed. If he's available it will be great, if not...then it's the next man up. The previous ESPN home games have all be incredibly exciting and the Aggie crowd has been fired up and loud. I expect more of the same tonight.
Like Coach Les said in the post-game interview, "we go our butts beat." Irvine is a really good basketball team. They're quick, long, deep and they play outstanding defense. We got shellacked but it was still a really fun atmosphere in the Pavilion.
This one is over. Time to shake it off and get ready for Fullerton on Saturday.
TJ looked a bit tentative, but that's to be expected. movielover summed it up pretty well. The entire team seemed to be out of synch, but then, lots of credit goes to the Anteaters who played very solidly. They outrebounded the Ags 44-22. The back-up forward, Elston Jones, was very hot with that unusual shot-put style shot: 6 of 7.
Bob Williams pointed out that their guards pressured our guards ALOT and we didn’t handle it well. Mooney and Silar never got good looks. Gonzalez was okay, and Squire penetrated well, but that was it. Bigs had looks, but didn’t finish.
Irvine has so many options. By far the class of the league
That being said, fun night at the pavilion- at least the first half
This was the second worst offensive performance of the year for the Aggies and we've had some dreadful ones. The worst was in the season opener where we got blown out by USF 76-42 and we shot only 27.5% overall and 15.8% from 3. This was almost as bad:
30.2% FG shooting overall including 22.2% in the second half
21.4% from 3 including 14.3% from 3 in the second half
61.9% from the FT line
It's unfortunate that we were ice cold before a good crowd (3777) in a nationally televised game. That kind of performance won't do anything to increase our attendance and fan support.