A Sea Of Red

Senior night in Liberty Arena, the last regular season home ride for the Big Three… plus five more, making it eight seniors getting their moment. Funny how that works. One minute everyone’s talking about the demoralizing loss to North Carolina State back in December, and then the Flames turn around and roll off a 17-game winning streak.

Then the Flames drop a couple after that streak and suddenly these so-called fans — the armchair coaches — start talking about reinventing the wheel like the whole thing just stopped working overnight.

Next thing you know it’s March and we’re talking about the last time these guys will run out there at home in the regular season.

Todays guest is Sam Houston State, the #2 team in the league, rolling into Lynchburg with the same thing Liberty’s got — a one-game losing streak and a little bruised pride. So yeah, both teams will come in acting like the sky fell this week.

Vegas has Liberty -4.5, which tells me the guys in the desert have been paying attention.

Of course if the Flames start a little slow the message boards will fire up right on cue:
“Packline’s broken.”
“Season’s over.”
“Play the 7 that will return next year — well… minus 1 since reality says the portal will be alive and well — so they can get experience for this moment.”

Relax. It’s senior night… and the Master usually only runs about 6–7 guys regularly anyway.

Coach McKay honored the seniors last night over at Truss with what I’m told was an unbelievable celebration. I’m assuming speeches were made, film was broken down on napkins, and someone probably tried to diagram the packline on the back of a menu.

Meanwhile the McKay-built squad usually does what it does in Liberty Arena… handle business.

LU Armchair Coach prediction:

Flames 76
Sam Houston 68

Liberty covers the 4.5, the eight seniors get their sendoff, and the panic posts can wait for another day.

The defense was so much better in this game. It will take this type of defensive effort to win the CUSA tournament championship. We still need to cut down on turnovers and rebound better. A slightly better job on the boards but still gave up a ton of costly offensive rebounds. We also have to remain in attack mode for 40 minutes and avoid slowing it down when we have a lead. At this point in the season there is no time for trying to rest on the court. This hasn’t been working for us and we keep allowing leads to dissipate when we do this. Overall, we played much better. Let’s keep it up!

Probably the biggest gripe I have with this year's team is their penchant for giving up big leads in the 2nd half. Similar to other games this year (notably against Mo. St), we come out firing in the 2nd half and build a solid 15+ pt lead and then with 13-15 mins in the game we start slowing the game down, by dog walking the ball on our end until we are pressed and hesitating to take good shots early in the shot clock. In other words, we get out of what put is in the lead in the first place, which is ball movement and taking a good open look regardless of when it occurs in the possession. It makes us easier to guard when we go late into the shot clock I think. We don't have enough size in our guards to have them drive to the basket and make contested layups at the rim.

I'd much rather see us continue to play with urgency on the offensive end running our standard concepts as opposed to spreading it out wide and waiting until there's 10-12 seconds left on the shot clock before running a play. Once we get down closer to the 7 minute mark and we have a 15+ point lead, fine by me... burn some clock. But it's nuts to do that when there's 15 minutes left in a game.