The Bills over SIU-e by 25

[The Wiz]

After 8 1/2  months...let's play some bball

Not much to see here. The Bills go into this game rated at B+....SIU-e is showing as an F team.

Injury report.....11/20...Bell...Foot....Questionable...It is unclear whether Bell will play in this game.

And this game is a wrap.

[JGR6396]

9 minutes ago, The Wiz said:

After 8 1/2  months...let's play some bball

Not much to see here. The Bills go into this game rated at B+....SIU-e is showing as an F team.

Injury report.....11/20...Bell...Foot....Questionable...It is unclear whether Bell will play in this game.

And this game is a wrap.

Vegas agrees, spread is 25. Opened at 24.

[BuiltFordBills]

I don’t really know much about SIUE but would you give or take the points if you were betting? Not sure if Ford will keep the starters out there longer to get ready for LSU or give some new guys some minutes to try to get them acclimated. 

[The Wiz]

2 hours ago, BuiltFordBills said:

I don’t really know much about SIUE but would you give or take the points if you were betting? Not sure if Ford will keep the starters out there longer to get ready for LSU or give some new guys some minutes to try to get them acclimated. 

a weak opponent....we may not run the score up....or we may not try as hard....The computer model doesn't usually doesn't consider any points past 20 significant. 1st game of  the season....no real data ...seems  like a good game to skip.

[The Wiz]

A very nice win....played out as expected....we pummeled an F team....not even the worst team we will play this year  ( Ark Pine Bluff...F-  )

A great night for numbers.....The largest win spread  for  a team opener....and a tie for the most pts in an opener by the Bills (89)

Star of the game...Perkins.....72 / 80 (4/5 ) / 100...how is that for a slash.  Goodwin had another double -double and Jimerson (3-3) and Hargrove (2-3)  helped out from the arc....Linssen shot a cool 88% from the charity stripe.  That could be valuable done the line.

As a team  it looked like this 45.9/ 45.5 / 77...usually when FG% and 3P% are about the same, it usually means you had a really good night or a really bad night ...put this in the good night category. . And no....there was no misprint ...we shot 77% from the FT line. If we hang around that number , we will win a few extra games.

To the naysayers who say,  we played an F team....I would say,   you still have to put the ball in the basket....Many teams can't shoot 46% from the arc with nobody guarding them. And of course nobody is guarding you at the foul line.  We may finally escape the title of the last couple of years as the worst foul  shooting team in Div 1

But it wasn't just about offense....we forced SIU-e into 25 TOs which was just as big a factor as our stellar offense.

The only concern I had was blocked shots ...we lost that battle 6-0...that number should change once Has returns. Speaking of Has...we did all this with no Has.  Also , we had an acceptable 14 TOs but I would like to see that number drop to around 11....Around 11 is more championship caliber.

Bottom line....Things turned out pretty much as expected especially for an opening night in a strange year.  But we can't bask in the glow of the opening win ...as we jump from F (SIU-e) to A (LSU).  I am showing this game right now as even.  I don't expect it to change much after the Tigers play SIU-e.  I will be sharpening my pencil and crunching the data (what little there is ) to read between the tea leaves. We will see what the Bills are made of in the next few days. 

In the meantime take a quick bask and then Go Bills.

[AnkielBreakers]

30 minutes ago, The Wiz said:

Bottom line....Things turned out pretty much as expected especially for an opening night in a strange year. 

I just want to point out that they outplayed your point spread by 15 points, by halftime.

[Old guy]

The fact does remain that we played a bit different than we did last year. Last year we tended to play at the level of the opponent, and many times did not trounce an opponent that was vastly inferior to us. This time we did not have much trouble blowing SIUE out of the water by 27 pts. We surely beat the spread this time. We had 5 players scoring in the double digits and Jacobs came close with 9 pts scored.

Let's see, we outrebounded them 40 to 28 (without French), we beat them on steals 13 to 10, we beat them on turnovers (one of our problems last year) 14 to 25, we beat them on assists 17 to 8, we also beat them on free throws made 76.7% to 66.7% and in 3 pts made 45.5% to 18.2%. Yes, they beat us in blocks but French was not in. To underscore how badly we beat them we had our deep bench including all walk-ons playing for a much longer than the usual amount of time in the last quarter.

It is true that we just did not need to play our main players for most if not all of the last quarter.

I think we may be even better than we think we are. True this was an F team we were playing, but we handled them in a way that we just did not do frequently during the last season when playing similar bad opponents. It may be that something is gelling within the Bills that is quite different than the way it was last year. Whatever it is, I like it a LOT.

Playing LSU without French will be a good test of just how good we are this year.