Jack Brady was at the game again last night. I had already given him a card with info about our board.
I won't comment too much about the game. There is little to say that hasn't already been said. I thought we spent too much time and effort in the first half trying to pound the ball inside. That's not Bradley's game, and aginst those big boys on Vanderbilt, it was doomed to failure. When Bradley just looked for a good outside shot in the 2nd half, we played much better.
Again, Bradley held their own on the boards with a much bigger team, despite Theron Wilson sitting out a long time with fouls.
Shan Foster is a tremendous player, and he will pose matchup problems and defense problems for a lot of other team this year. Actually, Daniel Ruffin seemed to defend Foster as well as anyone. Vanderbilt played well enough last night to beat almost anyone. I was impressed with Bradley's comeback. Everyone contributed during that comeback.
And, finally, the officiating realy hurt Bradley. The officials allowed a tremendous amount of body-bumping, which is how Vandy played defense. But they then called some of the most unbelieveable touch-fouls, in some cases 25 feet away from the ball and the basket. Theron Wilson did nothing to deserve a couple of the fouls he had called on him, considering Vandy's 7-foot, 300 pound behemoths were jumping over his back to get tips and rebounds.
The intentional foul call was absolutely ridiculous. Of course, Andrew was trying to foul the Vandy kid, but if you are going to call that, you could call it a dozen times every game when teams try to foul. And I still don't know what Jim Les did to deserve the technical foul. I was sitting a few feet behind Jim, and all he was saying to the official is that if you call that foul (an early offensive foul called against BU) then we want the same call on our end. He did not berate the official, and he didn't use profanity or leave the coaches box. The ref should have been paying more attention to the game, but I think he wanted to nail Bradley, maybe because he didn't like some of the fans getting on his case for the early foul calls. The officials were very inconsistent, but Bradley has to learn to adjust to the officiating better.
I believe if Bradley could play Vanderbilt 10 more times, we would win 7 or 8 of them.