March Madness

SUU men advance,
lose in 2nd round

By RICH JOHNSON
UNIVERSITY JOURNAL

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The wicked stepmother put an end to Cinderella’s dreams of going to the Big Dance fairly early in the evening. One day after upsetting Oakland,
SUU (11-17) couldn’t come back from an early deficit and fell to
No. 2 seed and eventual tournament champion IUPUI 72-65 in the Mid-Con semifinals at Kansas City’s Kemper Arena on March 10. “A lot of people were doubting us,” IUPUI’sOdell Bradley told reporters after the game. “In the paper (Monday) it said somebody gave the edge to Southern Utah, and we’re the No. 2 seed.”
Bradley was referring to a game summary in the Kansas City Star, which said logic would say IUPUI would win the game, but SUU had a Cinderella factor that might give the T-Birds an advantage in the matchup. “We worked hard to get here,” Bradley said. “It wasn’t OK for us to get here.” Bradley hit five 3-pointers in the first seven minutes of the game, and despite shooting 61 percent from the field in the first half, the T-Birds found themselves down 34-26 at the break. “I’m not a 3-point shooter, I’m just a ballplayer,” Bradley said. “I try to do whatever I can to help the team win.”
IUPUI led 44-33 with just more than 15 minutes to go in the game when the Jaguars went on a 12-3 run to break the game open.
Bradley hit a 3-pointer from the corner to stretch the Jaguars’ lead to 20 at 56-36.
SUU charged back and managed to cut the lead to five with a buzzer-beating 3-point shot by David Palmer, but it was too little, too late.
Palmer scored 24 of his 26 points in the second half. Palmer, a junior, earned All-Tournament team honors for averaging 22 points in SUU’s two games.
“I guess I had no conscience,” Palmer said. “I wasn’t really thinking about the shots, I was just shooting and they went in. I wish it would have been like that earlier in the game. It was a little bit too late. It felt good. I always want the shot at the end of the game, but it was too late.”
Al Williams also came up big in the final minutes, adding 7 points in the last five minutes for the ’Birds. With SUU trailing by 10, Williams scored a layup and was fouled with 1:08 left to cut the lead to 67-59.
Williams missed the free throw, grabbed his own rebound but missed a layup that could have cut the lead to six.
SUU struggled earlier in the season in beating IUPUI’s fast-paced press. Jaguars’ coach Ron Hunter said IUPUI’s defense was the key to the win.
“That’s how we play,” Hunter said. “We’re a trapping team. We like to press. We want to make teams feel uncomfortable about what they’re doing.
“We knew we couldn’t play Southern Utah nor Valparaiso nor Western Illinois in a half-court game,” he added. “We are not a half-court team. So we have to generate our baskets off of traps and steals and those things. The defense was the difference in this game.”
However, senior point guard Jay Collins said IUPUI’s full-court press didn’t rattle SUU too much.
“They got a couple of turnovers off it, but I really don’t think it bothered us at all,” Collins said. “I think the one thing we didn’t do was make them pay for trapping us. We didn’t convert on easy layups.”
SUU coach Bill Evans said the T-Birds were a little too passive on the offensive end early in the game.
“I wish we would have attacked to score more,” Evans said. “We wanted to do that in 2-on-1 and 3-on-2 situations, not 5-on-5. It hurt us some, but I don’t think all in all that was the difference in the game. I think the difference in the game as I look at it was our inability to score the ball in the half court.”Evans said sometimes it seems easy for a coach to second-