Wiedmer: Mocs’ loss to Citadel puts them at rock bottom

If you look hard enough and long enough, almost every athletic contest has a silver lining for the losing team.

So if you’re a University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men’s basketball fan today and you’re camped out on a ledge somewhere with razor blades and a hemlock cocktail following the Mocs’ 48-46 loss to The Citadel on Saturday night, here’s your sliver of sunshine:

This is rock bottom.

UTC coach John Shulman will dispute that fact.

He’ll say, as he did late Saturday, “I’m not at rock bottom. We’re not at rock bottom.”

Never mind that that statement is its own nightmare, since if losing to a Bulldosg bunch that entered McKenzie Arena with a 4-22 record — 1-14 in the Southern Conference — isn’t rock bottom, no Moc Maniac might want to envision what rock bottom is.

Still, coaches are somewhat forced to live in a NeverSayNeverland, lest their team quit on them short of the finish line.

So Shulman was technically right to say, “If we were getting beat 35 every night, I’d be concerned. But we’re not. We’ve got a prayer.”

An answered prayer just before halftime gave them the kind of adrenaline shot that should have easily disposed of a Citadel team that entered this game ranked 336th out of 344 Division I men’s basketball schools in the latest RPI rankings.

Down 25-23 to the Bulldogs with less than two seconds to go on the clock, the Mocs’ Dontay Hampton threw one up from Vine Street that went in at the horn to give UTC a 26-25 lead, its first since the 17:20 mark of the period.

“The play breaks down and Dontay throws that up ...,” Shulman waith with a slight smile.

But Hampton works on that shot every day in practice. Sometimes he hits four or five of them, according to senior point guard Keegan Bell.

And when Hampton hit that one it seemed as if the Mocs might have all the momentum they’d need to shake off the “bad karma” Shulman briefly alluded to in attempting to explain UTC’s ninth loss of the season by six points or less and its seventh defeat by three or less.

Yet inside the first-half statistics was also a reason not to believe anything had changed for the Mocs from their earlier heartbreaks. Averaging only 4.4 made 3-pointers for 40 minutes, the Bulldogs had bagged six by intermission. They would hit four more by the end of the game to finish 10-of-21 while the Mocs were missing 18 of their 21.

Even worse, up 43-36 with 5:50 to play in one of the worst games ever played inside 29-year-old McKenzie, the Mocs were outscored 12-3 the rest of the way.

“At the end, we had some mishaps on defense,” said Bell, who had an offensive mishap at the finish when his 25-foot 3-pointer rimmed out.

Added Shulman: “Some of the stuff that goes on out there is a joke.”

But it is no laughing matter to the Mocs fan base to watch a program picked to win the SoCon North in the preseason fall to 10-19 overall and 4-12 in the league with two games to go.

Consider this single point: The only way for UTC to avoid its first 20-loss season since becoming a Division I member during the 1977-78 season is to win the NCAA championship.

But, hey, Bell said, “Coach has got some new things he’s putting in next week.”

And Shulman said he believes the Mocs can still get it together in Asheville and win the SoCon tourney for the third time in his eight seasons on the job.

“People think I’m crazy,” he said, “but I’m a coach.”

What a lot of people hope is that this is as low as this program can go in a year in which it already has reached depths no one previously thought possible.

“If we have to save all our makes for the tournament,” Bell said, “that’s what we’ll do.”

That’s one way to look at all these misses and all these losses, we suppose. That might be the only way for Mocs fans to convince themselves there’s nowhere to go but up.