Southern Miss @ UCF: Preview

Matt's pre-game notes:

After taking down Rice for their first conference win, the Knights come home tomorrow for a game against the Southern Mississippi Golden Eagles. Southern Miss enters the contest with an 11-6 record, and a 2-1 in conference record, beating Tulane and a decent Houston team while losing to an underrated Tulsa team.

The Golden Eagles have a solid team overall. From what I can tell, there are a few things we need to look out for:

Guard Jeremy Wise, #3. He’s the team’s leading scorer at 17 PPG and he shoots almost 30% from 3. A versatile player, he lacks great height. To counter him, we’re going to need Jermaine Taylor to do what he does best: score. His 3pt% isn’t anything near amazing, so Tony Davis and Kenny Z are going to have to continue their dominance inside and make it tough for him to drive to the hoop. They don’t necessarily have to avoid fouls as much with AJ Tyler playing well inside lately as well. We have the depth to allow a couple of fouls to discourage their inside game.

Guard Craig Craft, #23. He’s the teams best 3 point shooter by miles, and has played in every game this season, starting in 9 of them. He hits almost 40% of his 3 pointers, a very solid number. We have to keep an eye on him whenever he’s beyond the arc. We may want to stick Rompza on him so we have someone on him at all times.

There are a couple of notes we should take advantage of with the Golden Eagles as well:

They have a huge lack of depth. Their starters account for 88% of their points, and we need to take advantage of this. We need to run a fast paced offense while moving the ball quickly down the court. We have far more depth than they do, and while we can sub in bench players to give our starters rest and still score, they aren’t going to be able to. We need to run, run, run, and run some more. Either they’re going to run with us and get tired, or let us run and have advantages in numbers down the floor after defensive rebounds.

Their other weakness is their inside play. Of their top 7 scorers, 6 are guards, and the one other is a forward. Interestingly enough their 6’3” guard Courtney Beasley is their leading rebounder by nearly 30 on the season. Davis, Zondervan, and Tyler should all crash the boards and make their putbacks. If we can’t take advantage of a weak inside game tomorrow, we may have issues.