Just got back to my PC from the game ... it was interesting!
First of all, Colgate is a beautiful, big campus in the middle of NOWHERE and the snow made it even better looking. Their gym was nothing to write home about. It was small and clean, but it could only hold about 1,500. Needless to say, there are a lot of high schools in Atlanta that are bigger. It was better lighted than James Madison, but James Madison had a MUCH better student section that was more rowdy. As a matter of fact the crowd at Colgate was not a factor. There were a lot of older folks there, kinda like at ETSU (
).
Anyway, on to the game. I usually don't say this, but the OFFICIALS were EXCELLENT until the last 8 minutes of the game! They called everything fairly and equally and nobody could really complain. And even in the last few minutes, there was only 1 that felt like he had to make ticky-tack calls agains us to put Colgate on the line and give them a chance to win. That was a COMPLETE reversal of James Madison, where they stopped calling it equally after about the first 6 minutes.
Ingle coached his ass off tonight. He played a sagging 1-2-2 and 1-3-3 defense and paid special attention to their shooters, but we never gave up second shots. Kurtis Woods showed his youth early tonight with bad passes and a few airballs as a result of forced shots. Ingle didn't tolerate it and, JD opened it up for us by knocking down a few early jumpers. John Michael didn't have a great game tonight and struggled to find his groove, but he didn't hurt us really bad. I think Colgate was scared of Allison's size and our quickness at guard. JD was the biggest guard out there and didnt hve a problem getting his shot. An amazing stat to me was other than sealing the game with his freethrows at the end, Kelvin McConnell had 6 rebounds to lead the team. To me, that means our big men still need work going after the ball.
In my honest opinion, I don't see how Colgate was 2-0 coming into the game unless they played some REALLY bad teams. I also know that they lost good players to graduation, but so did we. They go to Syracuse on Monday after playing UC Riverside on Saturday. They will lose at Syracuse (which is only 50 miles away) by 60.
The best part about this victory tonight is that this is the second team of 3 that we played and lost to last year. For you haters that thought we would have a losing record by now, Saturday against MDES is another one of those games.
I EXPECT more POSITIVE results before we start conference play on Monday!