Less-Than-Favorable NCAA Draw For LSU; Baseball Survives SEC Opening Weekend; Spring Camp Report; Bryce Brown Saga Ends Today
March 18th, 2009 ║ Posted By: MrSEC.com ║ Permalink
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Yesterday evening while Trent Johnson’s LSU basketball team licked its wounds from a rather embarrassing 67-57 loss to Mississippi State in the SEC Tournament on Saturday, the NCAA Selection Committee handed down its verdict on the Tiger season to date.
The result wasn’t exactly what the Tigers would have hoped for.
LSU was shipped off to Greensboro, NC, as an eight seed in the NCAA South Regional, which is the lowest seed given to an SEC regular-season champion in memory. The Tigers will take on Butler, 26-5 and the regular-season champ in the Horizon League, at 11:20 a.m. on Thursday – the first game in the NCAA Tournament proper, not counting the play-in game on Tuesday. That could mean LSU is the first team put out of this year’s NCAA Tournament.
Should LSU get past Butler, their prize is to play No. 1 seed North Carolina – in Greensboro – on Saturday. To say that a matchup with Tyler Hansborough is a disadvantageous one is an understatement.
If you go around the message boards and listen to the sports talk shows today and tomorrow, you’re going to hear a lot of bitter recriminations on how LSU got screwed and how Mike Slive, the SEC commissioner who chaired the NCAA Selection Committee, either is out to get LSU or is completely incompetent. I have no brief for Slive here, but he’s not to blame for LSU’s seeding.
LSU is.
The fact is, regardless of who you are you’re going to pay a price for losing three of your last four games going into Selection Sunday like LSU did. You’re going to pay an even larger price when two of those three losses come to teams which don’t make the NCAA Tournament and the other one is to a No. 13 seed. The Selection Committee has never been fans of cold teams, irrespective of Slive’s statement yesterday that they looked at an entire body of work in making up the tournament field.
And LSU’s body of work, unfortunately, isn’t all that great.
I don’t make that statement to disparage this season. It’s been a great year. But if you’re looking at objective reality, the No. 8 seed isn’t all that big a slap in LSU’s face. They’re sitting at No. 37 in all four major RPI rankings, which would actually put them as a No. 10 seed. Their schedule strength sits somewhere around 90th, which greatly detracts from a good-looking 26-7 record. Outside the SEC LSU has zero wins against NCAA Tournament teams; in 15 non-conference games the Tigers only played three teams headed to the Dance and Texas A&M, Utah and Xavier all handled them. Of the other 12, none of them are even going to the NIT, just four of them even managed winning records and seven of them didn’t even get to 10 wins.
Of course, LSU’s 13-3 SEC record is sparkling. There can be no doubt about that. But even there, the Tigers lost to three teams – Alabama, Auburn and Vanderbilt – who aren’t going to the NCAA Tournament, and though they managed to get wins over Tennessee and Mississippi State (twice), that’s it. So counting the loss to State in Tampa on Saturday LSU’s record against teams in the NCAA field this year is only 3-4. To be in the top half of a bracket might even be generous.
I understand the sense of outrage that an SEC champion should be seeded so low. But Tennessee and Mississippi State were the only other SEC teams making the tournament, and while Auburn, Florida and South Carolina all had a little bit of an argument to make none of them were really even close to getting in. You can gripe about Arizona and Wisconsin getting into the field, but truth be told none of the SEC teams were next in line. St. Mary’s has a much better argument for having gotten in than any of the SEC teams who were left out. Ditto for San Diego State and Creighton.
So the SEC was terrible this year, which we’ve known since the pre-conference schedule when the league was a mere 9-21 against RPI Top 50 opponents. LSU was the best of a bad lot, didn’t make any noise outside the conference and then lost three of four to close the season.
Getting a No. 8 seed is probably about right, despite the disappointed reactions coming out of LSU’s basketball squad room.
As for Butler, they’re a quality club. Butler had some quality out-of-conference wins over Xavier, UAB, Northwestern and Davidson, not to mention a razor-thin margin of defeat at Ohio State. They’re not invincible, though, having lost at home to Loyola of Chicago (who was 14-18 this year) and on the road to Milwaukee (17-14) and Green Bay (22-10) before getting upset in the Horizon tournament by Cleveland State (25-10). Butler has camped out in the NCAA Tournament on a pretty consistent basis the last few years, though, so they’ll be a relatively seasoned opponent. 31-year old head coach Brad Stevens was 30-4 in his first year as a head coach last year, having taken over for Todd Lickliter (now at Iowa) and previously having coached at Butler under Thad Matta (now at Ohio State). There’s a lot of continuity in that program and it’s beginning to pan out into success on the recruiting trail.
Butler’s lineup is relatively young, as they’ve got six freshmen, four sophomores, four juniors and no seniors on this year’s team. The best player on the team is the guy who will really give LSU trouble – 6-8, 230-pound sophomore post player Matt Howard, who leads the club with 14.6 points and 6.7 rebounds per game. Howard bangs inside almost exclusively, and his field goal stat (.548) proves it. He’s been to the foul line 216 times in 31 games, which is a ton, and he’s hitting 77.3 percent from there. In other words, this is a guy who can back Chris Johnson down under the goal and get easy baskets on him. But Johnson does have a three-inch height advantage, so with a good performance it’s possible Howard can be neutralized. Perhaps the best way to do that is to go right at him when LSU has the ball; Howard averages 3.1 fouls a game in only 27.8 minutes. This is a guy who can be fouled out.
The two next best players on Butler’s team are freshmen. Gordon Hayward is a 6-8, 200-pounder who can drain three-pointers with the best of them. Hayward, who averages 13.2 points and 6.5 rebounds a game, has taken 146 three-pointers in 251 field goal attempts, which should give you an indication of what kind of style to expect from him. He’s as good a shooter as LSU will have seen all year long – Hayward is hitting 48.2 percent from the field, 44.5 percent from the three-point line and 81.5 percent at the foul line. Garrett Temple will probably draw Hayward Thursday, and he’s going to be challenged.
Shelvin Mack is Butler’s point guard, though he doesn’t quite look the part at 6-3 and 214 pounds. Mack averages 11.7 points, 4.3 rebounds and 3.5 assists per game, and those scoring numbers would be better but for some lousy shooting percentages – namely 39.0 percent from the floor and 32.0 percent from the arc. Mack is a physical, athletic player, though, and he’s a terrific defender who will probably draw Marcus Thornton on Thursday.
Beyond those three guys, Butler will roll out a bunch of guys whose job is basically to beat on people. The fourth starter is 6-3 junior Willie Veasley, who will play an undersized forward spot. Veasley averages 8.9 points and 4.3 rebounds a game, with about half his shots coming from beyond the arc with not all that great a percentage (32.7 percent). Like Howard, though, he’s a guy who collects fouls; Veasley averages 2.7 fouls per game. The fifth starter is 6-0 freshman guard Ronald Nored, who is something of a wallflower in that he only averages 4.2 points per game. They’ll bring sixth man Zack Hahn (6-1 sophomore, 5.3 ppg, 41.3 3-pt pct) off the bench to bomb from outside, and the rest of the bench is 6-1 sophomore Shawn Vanzant (3.6 ppg), 6-8 junior Avery Jukes (3.1 ppg, 2.0 rpg) and 6-7 freshman Garrett Butcher (2.6 ppg, 1.5 rpg).
LSU can beat this team if they play well. They really don’t have the size to cause the Tigers the kind of trouble the Vanderbilts and Xaviers of the world can. But Butler will play that deliberate Big 10 style of ball, and they will hand-check and hold and bang like crazy all game long. LSU has very little positive experience with teams playing that style this year.
The key is going to be handling the zone defense, which I have no doubt Butler will use against LSU, and specifically finding ways to get Tasmin Mitchell the ball inside. Mitchell will be the key to getting Howard to foul out; if LSU can remove him from the equation Butler no longer has an effective inside presence and this game becomes eminently winnable so long as Temple can stick to Hayward and keep him from draining three-pointers at will.
As for North Carolina, I don’t need to even go into how difficult a matchup that would be for LSU. Suffice it to say it would take a lot better effort than the Tigers have yet displayed to beat that team in Greensboro, and how the Tigers would handle Hansborough and Deon Thompson inside is totally beyond me.
LSU Survives Rain, Kentucky In SEC Opening Weekend: While the news in basketball is mixed at best, it might be a little more positive in baseball – as the Tigers managed to get three games in this past weekend amid the constant rain and took two of the three away from a good visiting Kentucky team.
Louis Coleman got two wins for LSU, having thrown 2 2/3 innings in relief Friday for a victory and a complete game in the second game of Sunday’s doubleheader. Sunday’s games were both seven innings, so Coleman’s total of 9 2/3 innings for the weekend was one for the books. Sunday, Coleman allowed just four hits and no walks in seven innings, giving up only one run and striking out seven in a 3-1 win. LSU only had two hits of their own in the game, but the Tigers managed six walks – and a two-run homer by Ryan Schimpf was the difference.
On the whole, there wasn’t much offense to speak of. LSU won 5-3 on Friday, lost the first game 5-2 on Sunday and then won 3-1 thanks to Coleman’s masterpiece. Anthony Ranaudo, who got a no-decision Friday, had 13 strikeouts in a little more than six innings, while Austin Ross gave up eight hits and four runs in six innings Sunday morning to take a loss – but struck out seven and didn’t walk anybody. Even Ross’ performance was good enough to win.
But Kentucky has some serious pitching as well. Their first two starters James Paxton and Chris Rusin are lefties who throw 90 mph, and those guys tied LSU in knots the first two games – then Sunday afternoon UK brought out a 6-8 freshman lefty in Alex Meyer who was just as tough. They’re a so-so hitting team, but with pitching like that UK is going to be a factor in the SEC race.
The one thing LSU really did well this past weekend was steal bases. The Tigers were 12-of-12 in the three games, and Jared Mitchell had seven of those steals, including four in the second game Sunday. Mitchell looks like he’s emerged as the leadoff man for LSU after Leon Landry and Ryan Schimpf have had trouble there; Mitchell’s numbers look pretty good for a leadoff hitter considering he’s hitting .455 with a .640 on-base percentage and he’s got 17 stolen bases in 13 games.
Hitting throughout the lineup is becoming a problem for LSU, though. Of the Tigers’ nine regulars, five of them are hitting .273 or below – including Schimpf at .263, Landry at .262, Micah Gibbs at .259 and Blake Dean at .250. Those guys can’t keep hitting like they have if this team is to catch its stride; they’re all vital cogs in the batting order.
Notes From The Ponderosa: Today is Pro Day at LSU, so the Tiger outgoing seniors will be running 40’s and compiling other measurables for the NFL scouts. Things get started at 11:00 and LSU will post the 40 times and other stuff here.
Meanwhile, word from Saturday’s action at practice is that Steven Ridley suffered a knee injury, though we’re not sure yet how bad it is. Early word said the sophomore running back blew an ACL, but I haven’t seen confirmation on that.
If it’s an ACL, Ridley could maybe make it back for the second half of the season. But the fullback situation would become significantly confused, as Ridley was supposed to be a Jacob Hester-type versatile fullback for LSU this year and there isn’t really a good substitute for him in spring camp right now. With Kellen Theriot missing spring due to injuries (Theriot was maybe going to switch to fullback this spring) and Tyler Edwards only a part-time fullback, the only guy at the position now is Charles Scott – and he’s a tailback who moonlights there at best.
Freshman Dominique Allen looks like he’s going to have that job handed to him when he shows up for fall camp in August. I hope he’s ready.
As for LSU’s running back depth, it’s a little thin this spring. With Ridley out and Trindon Holliday running track, LSU has Scott, Keiland Williams and Richard Murphy and that’s it for scholarship tailbacks. Don’t be surprised if guys like Drayton Calhoun or John Williams moonlight some there.
It’s Almost Over: Of course, the possibility exists that LSU could add a tailback today for this fall. Bryce Brown is scheduled to make an announcement as to where he’s going at 1 p.m., and LSU, Tennessee, Kansas State and Oregon are apparently the four finalists.
Brown took an unofficial visit to Tennessee over the weekend, apparently so he could see how Boy Kiffin runs practices. You’d think that would indicate Tennessee has the inside track, but reports coming out of Knoxville this weekend make it sound like it’s not all that impressive there – particularly when the fans are booing their spring practices. Some even say LSU might be in front.
Either way, it will be nice when this is over.
I’m still more than a little surprised at the idea that Brown is seriously considering Tennessee – or if he is, that he’s paying serious attention to what he’d be getting himself into. Seems to me you’d have to be crazy to sign on over there considering that Kiffin is at war with the Oakland Raiders, his former employer, who shot a blistering letter to the University of Tennessee alleging a number of unsavory things. All this arises from Kiffin filing for arbitration so he could get two months’ worth of his Oakland salary after he was fired for cause by Al Davis, who Kiffin’s lawyer will be deposing tomorrow; considering that he’s making $2 million a year at Tennessee, it seems really counterproductive to be having that fight and generating the bad press and the wrath of the Raiders on top of everything else that’s going on.
But this is not a guy who does or says things which make sense. After all, he threw out this quote the other day:
“The biggest shock to me is how much negative recruiting there is in this conference,” Kiffin said. “We don’t do that. There are so many great programs, I would think they would want to sell their own teams. I’m shocked at how concerned other programs are with us, being that we’re a new staff and we didn’t have a very successful year last year.”
Amazing – you falsely accuse another head coach of cheating, you induce your recruits to lie to your opponents and you tell kids they’ll be stuck pumping gas if they don’t sign with you and you have the unmitigated gall to proclaim yourself shocked at the negative recruiting which goes on?
Remember, Al Davis fired this guy because he couldn’t stomach any more lies – or at least that’s what Davis said. Then we see the guy’s quotes in the media, which line up pretty much perfectly with what Davis said.
And recruits are supposed to trust anything Boy says?
I think LSUfreek has it exactly right where Kiffin is concerned:
