I was at that game. It sucked.

I was sitting in the front row of the student section and one of the players came up to us pre-game and said that if we win he wants us to rush the court. We technically ended up tying UT for the Eastern title that year anyway but lost to them twice that season.

They made it to the NCAAT and we got bounced in the first round of the NIT by a Curry-led Davidson squad. A UT win would have assuredly put us in the tournament.

eta: In hindsight, because we didn't go to the tournament it was pretty cool to get a front row seat to watch Curry do his thing.

This post was edited on 1/28/16 at 8:49 pm

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Posted by ConwayGamecock

South Carolina

Member since Jan 2012

9121 posts

Posted on 1/29/16 at 12:18 am to theGarnetWay

quote:
I was at that game. It sucked.

I was sitting in the front row of the student section and one of the players came up to us pre-game and said that if we win he wants us to rush the court. We technically ended up tying UT for the Eastern title that year anyway but lost to them twice that season.

They made it to the NCAAT and we got bounced in the first round of the NIT by a Curry-led Davidson squad. A UT win would have assuredly put us in the tournament.

eta: In hindsight, because we didn't go to the tournament it was pretty cool to get a front row seat to watch Curry do his thing.

Yep, the Vols always had our number in the Bruce Pearl years, because they always had the physical depth in the post, and those were among their leading players, while we were always either too short, too thin, or both.

That game they just beat the crap out of us in the paint, and out-rebounded us 44-22 and it wasn't even THAT close. Their forwards and big shooting guard were their top scorers and top rebounders, and they dominated in pts in the paint, 2nd chance points, etc.

I was hoping that with that physical advantage in the post being switched sort of to South Carolina's side of late, that we'd benefit from it against them in Knoxville. Last season there really wasn't much of an advantage on either side as the rebounding was minimal at 25-25 for each team. Tennessee's shooting was poor in that game as Punter was only 3-9 and scored only 9 pts in the 60-49 Gamecock win.

At home last season we were the better-rebounding team, but they raped us from the 3-pt line - that time not from one player, but from the entire team, shooting 10-18 from the 3 and 57% overall from the field, and jumped out to a huge lead before fighting off the late Gamecock surge to win 66-62.

But this season in Knoxville it was again a tie in rebounding at 34-34 - the difference in this game was Punter was the only Vol that went off, but he went off enough to be UT's only offense: if we could've contained him just a little bit, we'd have won the game.

We'll host them again this season, and hopefully we do a better job of defending the perimeter, or it's going to be another shower of threes against us...

Coincidentally, there were TWO sellouts in 2008-09 that didn't involve Kentucky: a month prior to that UT game, we sold out for Georgia, and actually won that game 79-68. We averaged over 15,000 for SEC home games that season, but strangely enough we did NOT sell out the home game versus Kentucky that season: only 16,035 for the 77-59 Gamecock win. Of course, UK wasn't #1 that year, either...