Wiedmer: Mocs pass first test after finals just fine

Other than Duke Ethridge’s mighty one-handed slam, Mocs Nation likely will little remember the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s 91-63 win over Tennessee Wesleyan on Tuesday night.

The Bulldogs may have entered this contest with a 6-1 record, but Wesleyan is an NAIA school. The Mocs, on the other hand, already have posted road victories over Georgia and Illinois. UTC should win this type of game with relative ease and that’s just what happened, even if the visitors did cut a 44-17 Mocs lead inside the final minute of the opening half to 46-30 early in the final half.

But Tuesday also marked the end of finals week at UTC, and as senior Casey Jones said, “It’s the one time all year you’re not 100 percent focused on basketball. It’s late at night and you’re trying to finish a paper or study for a final. It’s hard.”

The hardest part for Jones came Friday when he took his final in an engineering class called “Quality Control and System Reliability.”

Asked if he got an “A,” Jones shook his head and replied, “I don’t know that I did that, I just know that I did the best I could. I really worked hard in that class.”

Point guard Greg Pryor was working so hard to finish a paper Monday night that he was late for the team’s shootaround.

First-year UTC coach Matt McCall expects all his players to be on time, if not early, for every practice, but because his point guard is supposed to be an extension of the coach while on the floor, McCall said, “I hold him to a higher standard.”

So when Pryor was late – “a hiccup,” in the coach’s words – McCall benched him for the start of the Wesleyan game, though the junior from Memphis ultimately played 22 minutes, hit all six of his free throws and finished with eight points.

“Greg handled it like a professional,” McCall said. “He didn’t pout. But I told him afterward, ‘Please don’t do this to me again.'”

For most Mocs fans, the real season begins again Saturday at 7 p.m., when the Mocs invade Dayton, perhaps the most successful mid-major in the country the last few seasons and a program that once reached the Final Four in the 1960s.

“Dayton’s had an enormous amount of success over the years,” McCall said. “The whole A-10 (Atlantic 10 Conference) has. If the NCAA tournament began today, I’d say the A-10 would get more bids than the (Southeastern Conference).”

But playing as it has to date in building a 6-2 record, the Mocs might also deserve an at-large bid if they somehow fail to win the Southern Conference tournament in early March, which is the only certain way a team from the SoCon reaches March Madness.

Yet let UTC win at Dayton and it will have three road victories against multi-bid leagues. And while the Louisiana-Monroe road loss is a brief head-scratcher, that was also the first game that big man Justin Tuoyo missed for concussion symptons. Given that the Mocs lost by 10 and Tuoyo is averaging 11.2 points and 2.8 blocks a game, the NCAA Selection Committee would surely consider his absence when considering UTC’s resume.

Especially since the only other loss to this point was at Iowa State, which currently stands No. 2 in the coaches’ poll.

But for this morning, it’s enough that the Mocs methodically wore down the Bulldogs after a wearying week of finals and scattered practices.

“It’s tough for everybody,” McCall said. “I won’t have a practice without everybody there. But you find yourself practicing at 8 a.m., noon and 6 p.m. If guys have a final that ends at 2 and another that starts at 5:30, you might practice at 3. But it’s always a difficult week, especially with the schedule we’ve had, on the road so much and they’re trying to cram a lot of schoolwork into a short period of time.”

Now they have all the time in the world. School’s out for weeks. Which means there’s no 20-hour work week for UTC’s student-athletes.

“We can practice as much as we want,” McCall said with a grin.

So for the rest of the week they’ll prepare nonstop for Dayton’s Flyers, hopeful to post a third huge road win before SoCon play begins at The Citadel on Jan. 2.

But no matter what happens at Dayton, this season already has been a breakthrough of sorts, given the wins at Georgia and Illinois, as well as the athletes on display in those victories. Those include the senior Ethridge, whose jaw-dropping one-handed alley-oop dunk drew this praise from McCall after watching the Georgia native score 19 points in 22 minutes: “When he jumps, he can put his head above the rim. There aren’t many people as athletic as him in the entire country.”

“Our confidence level has skyrocketed (under McCall),” said Jones, who’s had three head coaches at UTC: John Shulman, Will Wade and McCall. “Coach instills that in us every day. He’s always saying, ‘I want to play you.’ It’s the highest confidence level we’ve had since I’ve been here.”

Because of that, a sports writer asked Jones if he thought a win against Dayton should put the Mocs in the at-large discussion if they somehow fail to win the SoCon tourney.

“I do,” he said. “But we plan on winning the tournament so we don’t have to worry about that.”

That kind of confidence level coupled with athletes such as Ethridge are what often lead mid-level programs such as Dayton or UTC to stage long marches through March.

Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.