The Mocs were close.
But the game of basketball isn’t horseshoes or hand grenades, so close doesn’t count as a victory.
The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga fell 73-65 to Murray State on Saturday in a game where the Mocs had their chances to win.
If they would have played better in the first half, they could have won. If they would have finished a comeback from a 19-point deficit, they could have won.
If they would have made a few more free throws, a couple more defensive stops, a 3-pointer at a critical time or had a few less turnovers, they could have won.
They didn’t.
“When you go back and watch film, you want to find something glaringly wrong so you can fix it,” UTC coach John Shulman said Sunday. “I was thinking, ‘There has to be something,’ but there wasn’t.
“We were two or three breaks away from winning that game.”
Shulman could have picked any four-minute stretch from Saturday’s game and found a mistake or two that could have turned a four-point game with seven minutes to play into a victory.
In the first four minutes Jeremy Saffore had two turnovers that led to Murray State layups less than five seconds later.
“I have to show the guys that we had two chances early in the game to score but turned it over,” Shulman. “Those led to layups, so that’s an eight-point swing. We lost by eight.”
The end result is an ‘L’ in UTC’s overall win-loss column, a loss that could hurt them a bit if they are selected to the NIT or NCAA tournament. Those are big ifs, considering the Southern Conference season will determine UTC’s postseason.
“The long-term lesson we learned is that Chattanooga has a lot of fight,” said Omar Wattad, who led all players with 23 points on Saturday. “Another lesson is that you can’t beat a team like that by getting down 19 points.
“We only played for 20 minutes and got beat by eight.”
UTC played one of its worst halves of the season on Saturday, right after the opening tip. UTC allowed MSU to shoot 61 percent from the floor, 22 points in the paint and the Racers had 17 points off UTC turnovers.
“We weren’t that far off, even in the first half when we had a few things go against us,” Shulman said. “We gave ourselves a chance to win the game.”
A lesson Shulman learned from the loss is that UTC cannot play man-to-man defense on every single possession. He said he has to mix things up, “… just a little bit,” in upcoming games. UTC will next play at Elon on Friday.
“We need to have a Plan B defensively so we don’t give people the same look over-and-over,” Shulman said. “It makes me sick to think about that, but maybe we have to play a zone to buy a possession here or there.”
A couple different possessions could have resulted in a different ending on Saturday.
Contact David Uchiyama at duchiyama@timesfreepress.com or at 423-757-6484. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/UchiyamaCTFP.