Mark WiedmerWhat a way to waste the best University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men’s basketball crowd of the past three years and the seventh-largest of the century.
That’s at least one way to view the Mocs’ shocking 65-51 loss to East Tennessee State on Saturday evening inside McKenzie Arena that really wasn’t that close.
With its final frail hopes to repeat as Southern Conference regular-season champs hanging on this game, with a boisterous crowd of 6,402 on hand to support this year’s Mocs and also the 1977 Division II national championship team, UTC turned in one of its most inept offensive efforts imaginable.
Not only did the Mocs turn it over 19 times, but they hit just two of 16 3-pointers until the final 2:04, when the Mocs bagged four straight to turn a 60-39 deficit into the final margin.
“Sometimes you just get outplayed,” said fifth-year senior Casey Jones, who’s only rumored to have played on that ’77 championship squad. “On Monday we’ll get back to practice and watch film. We’ve got two weeks until March 3 (Southern Conference tournament).”
Two weeks. Two weeks to clean up whatever appears to be ailing a UTC squad that began the season with such promise by posting a road win at Tennessee. That team looked capable of almost anything. This team, a little more than three months later, may look less like an NCAA tournament squad than it did a month ago, or two months ago, or even 17 days ago, when it crushed UNC Greensboro 91-68 inside this same Bigger Mac to avenge an earlier loss to the Spartans.
The Mocs are 3-2 since that win but have also lost to Furman on the road and ETSU at home over a nine-day stretch.
When someone asked second-year coach Matt McCall after this one if this was a wake-up call, he answered: “We’ve been woken up before.”
You can argue that a team starting five seniors shouldn’t need a wake-up call. Especially a team that is the defending conference champ. And the crowd certainly did all it could to cheer UTC on to a victory that would have left it one off the SoCon lead, since league-leading Furman lost at home to UNCG.
And it might be a concern. Emphasis on “might.”
Because as even winning coach Steve Forbes said afterward, “It’s all going to come to two weeks from today. We’ll be in Asheville and it will be anyone’s game.”
For several seasons, this was one of the strongest criticisms aimed at former UTC coach John Shulman, that he publicly pointed out how meaningless the regular season was in terms of securing an NCAA bid from a one-bid conference such as the SoCon.
But now that’s really all that’s left for Moc Maniacs to cling to as February fades to March. Though it mathematically isstill alive, there’s almost no way for UTC to win the regular season. So now the conference tournament is basically all that matters, though Forbes’ comments about his team’s effort should matter much to Moc seniors going forward.
“We were a little faster to the ball today,” said the ETSU coach, whose team also beat the Mocs in Johnson City (76-71). “When the ball was on the floor, we really wanted it.”
Wanting the ball, scrapping for the ball, owning the loose balls has been something the Mocs have done as well as anyone over the past four years under the coaching of Will Wade (the 2014 and 2015 seasons) and McCall’s tenure since then.
Yet in SoCon games only, the Mocs entered Saturday trailing the Buccaneers in nearly every hustle category, whether steals (9.3 to 7.5), blocked shots (5.1 to 4.5), rebounding margin (+6.5 to -0.4) or field goal defense (41.6 to 45.5).
“Not a single spot on the floor were we better than them today,” McCall said. “Not the starters. Not the bench. Not coaching. Bottom line, they were better.”
Fortunately, other than the loss, it couldn’t have been a better homecoming for the ’77 champs. The crowd roared when several of the players and former coach Ron Shumate were introduced at halftime, and the school did a wonderful job of having the crowd in white T-shirts that paid homage to the home jerseys worn by the national-title team, as well as handing each a commemorative basketball.
“They were showing us some gratitude because it’s been so long,” said William “Too Quick” Gordon, the Mocs’ blur of a point guard back then. “We’ll always be the favorite Mocs team.”
But if this year’s Mocs can get their act together enough to repeat as SoCon tourney champs, they almost certainly woulld be among the five or six most beloved UTC teams ever.
“We just have to be prepared to see (ETSU) again,” Jones said. “You can’t run from them.”
At least the Mocs can’t if they expect to go on any March run worth remembering 40 years later.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com