If you would have asked us for a hypotheitcal game summary one hour before tip yesterday, it would have sounded almost exactly like what actually took place last night. Of course it's not like it was all that hard to predict, almost everyone else who has seen this team would likely have told you something along the same lines. Let's review:
--The outside shooting woes continue (3-of-17 from three (17.6%).
--The Cards could get into the paint basically whenever they wanted to.
--Juan Palacios had a field day around the basket, but still missed more than one three-footer.
--Palacios wasn't the only one who missed a lay-up.
--Louisville benefitted from a bevy of Tiger turnovers (25).
--Savannah State is the worst team we will play all season.
--T-Will had a cool dunk.
--Someone got hurt (David Padgett tweaked his knee and didn't play in the second half).
--Terrance Farley and Jonathan Huffman both failedto impress, which against Savannah State is an accomplishment in itself.
--The attendance dipped, but it was still respectable (16,694).
--Stuart Miller played.
--And naturally someone did something horribly embarrassing (Edgar Sosa).
Of course not everything was so predictable. The biggest and best surprise last night was the way that the Cards shot free-throws. Louisville hit 18-of-23 from the charity strips, and especially impressive was Juan Palacios who knocked down 10-of-12. Who you're playing has no baring on your ability to make free throws, so a good night from the stripe was one of the biggest plusses that could have (and did) come out of last night's game.
And then of course the most disappointing part of last night's game actually occurred before it took place when Derrick Caracter somehow managed to get himself suspended.
We have absolutely no idea what he did, but when a coach is asked about a suspended player's status for the team's next game and says something like: "It's really not a concern to me (if he plays). I'm more concerned with getting the other guys ready to play," it says to us that what he did was something along the lines of mouthing off to a coach or walking out of a workout or soemthing else that someone who has no idea of how much money he's about to cost himself would do.
Get your head out of your ass kid. This is your life.
The Cards now prepare for a Christmas Eve Eve tilt with an extremely bi-polar Miami (Fla) squad. The Canes own a win over then 21st ranked Georgia Tech, but have inexplicably lost to Buffalo (60-57), Cleveland State (78-67), and fell last night (79-74) to a Binghamton team that Akron beat by 35 earlier in the season. Still, this is the closest thing to a test that the Cards have before they play in front of a hostile South Bend crowd in their Big East opener against the suddenly amazing Notre Dame, and it's important to get the ball rolling now if this team wants to have any hope of becoming what so many of us thought they would be before the season began.