It just might be the trap game to end all trap games, this Southern Conference road trip the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men’s basketball team must make to Mercer on Monday night.
After all, how often does a team have to face a league opponent on the road roughly 53 hours after defeating them in their home gym, which UTC did in Saturday’s 77-68 victory over the Bears inside McKenzie Arena?
Beyond that is both the natural revenge factor for Mercer, as well as a kind of desperation moment for the Bears if they’re to have any chance of staying in the SoCon race for a regular-season championship.
Already three games in back of the league-leading Mocs with seven to go, Mercer can ill afford to fall four back with six to play. Two behind with six left is possible, which is where the Bears would be after Monday were they to win. Four back? Start worrying about avoiding the two first-round games on that first Friday night of March in Asheville, North Carolina, for the SoCon tourney’s seventh through 10th seeds.
So on the face of it, the old argument of do you want a win or need a win would seem to move the desperation meter sharply toward Mercer.
But UTC needs this win for different reasons, perhaps more intangible than tangible, but hugely important nonetheless.
“The next one is going to be a tough one,” Mocs coach Lamont Paris said Saturday afternoon of the rematch, after his team improved to 19-5 overall and 9-2 in conference play.
There have been two tough ones in league play this year for UTC fans to accept. The first was a 70-59 road loss at Western Carolina on Jan. 12. The second was last Wednesday at Samford, the Bulldogs topping the Mocs 70-59.
Check the SoCon standings and Samford stands seventh in the 10-school league with Western in the cellar. Perhaps that’s why, according to ESPNU broadcasters Brock Bowling and David Padgett, Paris conducted Friday’s practice with bags of potato chips strapped to his shoulders to tell his occasionally disappointing team they needed to start playing with a chip on their shoulders.
As if on cue, UTC’s leading scorer this season, Malachi Smith, said of the No. 1 reason for the Mocs’ 13-point scoring edge over the final half against Mercer: “Coming out with a chip on our shoulder. We are getting every team’s best shot. Everyone wants to beat us.”
Staff photo by Robin Rudd / UTC’s Avery Diggs (23) looks to pass during Saturday’s SoCon game against Mercer. The Mocs won 77-68 at McKenzie Arena, but they’ll face the same Bears again Monday night in Macon, Ga.There were entire decades within the SoCon when everybody wanted to beat UTC just because it was UTC, not unlike the way Southeastern Conference programs want to beat Kentucky or Atlantic Coast Conference programs want to derail Duke and North Carolina.
Maybe that mindset has lessened a bit given that the Mocs have reached the NCAA tournament but twice since 2006. But now that they’re on top of the league at the moment, that intensity should be back, beginning Monday night in Macon, Georgia.
Are these Mocs prepared for those battles to come? Can they enter the SoCon tourney in four weeks as the No. 1 seed? Can they win it from any seed to reach the NCAA tourney for the first time since 2016?
Saturday was one example of why they can. Without post player Silvio DeSousa, out with an undisclosed injury, UTC reserve Josh Ayeni not only scored 18 points – second only to Smith’s 22, which included 18 in the final half – he did so while hitting eight of 10 field-goal attempts, including two 3-pointers.
Said Paris of such an unexpected boost: “After the game, (Ayeni) told me, ‘See, I want to win, man.’ He is a competitive guy. It was fun to watch him flourish on the offensive side of the ball instead of normally his main role is to defend and rebound. That’s my real enjoyment … seeing a guy flourish like that.”
For the Mocs to flourish in March, they need for more game-changing players to come off the bench with both offensive explosions and defensive stops. They need everyone on board and ready to contribute. Seeing Ayeni turn in just such a performance against Mercer a couple weeks after Grant Ledford delivered a similar effort off the bench against Furman is a good sign for the future.
UTC can lose at Mercer and not lose much of anything moving forward. The Mocs can get revenge on Western Carolina by winning in McKenzie on Wednesday night, and they can still lock up any tiebreaker against Furman by sweeping the season series when they visit the Paladins three days later.
But at one point during Saturday’s broadcast, Padgett, once the interim coach at Louisville after Rick Pitino was fired, called the Mocs “one of the best mid-major teams in the country.”
To prove that, to show it’s got a big enough chip on its shoulder not to lose a trap game at Mercer, not to be outworked and outhustled by a desperate foe, UTC needs to beat the Bears on Monday night.
Mark WiedmerContact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @TFPWeeds.