Monday night, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga head men’s basketball coach Dan Earl got the best of both worlds for a season opener.
A win and a lot of room for improvement.
Maybe there were nerves from so many new pieces getting on the McKenzie Arena court, as eight of the 11 players who competed for UTC on Monday doing so for the first time with the team. Maybe it was a spirited effort from a Covenant team that the Mocs beat by 53 points just a season ago. But while the Mocs’ wire-to-wire 89-44 win looks impressive on the ledger, it was anything but from the trained eye.
“I give a ton of credit to Covenant. They played hard, they moved the ball, they set a bunch of screens,” Earl said. “I don’t think that we were solid on either end of the floor; we’ve had a couple of scrimmages that have gone relatively well and we have been solid, but I felt like tonight we were trying to hit a home run offensively, to make one shot that’s worth 20 points or get the crowd going and then defensively, we took chances.
“I don’t think we were solid.”