re: LSU @ South Carolina discussion

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Who do you guys think willnl guard Simmons? Thronwell? Carrera?

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Hard to say but it's been a question many have asked before facing Simmons all season long.

Not sure you can control him ... you just try to contain him and hope he is off on a given night.

Was his low performance/output for the season vs Oklahoma? I know everyone billed the battle to be between Heild and Simmons, but I don't really remember them guarding one another most of the time - did they?

I think Oklahoma tried to prevent Simmons from doing much damage down low and instead wanted to force him to have to hurt them from long range ... which sorta worked.

The problem with LSU and Simmons is that even if you somehow manage to contain Simmons, LSU still has other players that can beat you. And SCAR has made stars out of role players all season by taking that approach.

So to answer your question I would imagine we're going to see a lot of mix and match defenses vs LSU ... 3-2, 2-3 zones ... plenty of man-to-man with different defenders put in Simmon's face over the course of the game to give him different looks until we find one who has some success against him and, who knows, maybe we'll even see a little modified free-floating box-and-one just to try to frustrate him a little.

So I think we'll see Carrera and Thornwell on him, maybe a little P.J. Dozier since they are somewhat familiar with one another from the Mickey-D's A-A game, and we might see some Mindaugas in there too because Mindaugas is better defensively, and seems to love a challenge, more than he gets credit for at times.

Hopefully the crowd will be a major factor given that it's a sellout and there will be 18k nuts in the house.