Bluejaysfan

Well, if you do get off to a good start it WILL get quiet in there. The prices of the tickets in the lower bowl (and the OUTRAGEOUS mandatory donations you have to pay to secure those season tickets) means that damn near everyone down there not in the student section is a 55+ doctor, lawyer, or pharmacist, and they're normally sitting on their hands anyway. The proletariat sits in the upper deck and is normally loud, and the place gets really amped up when things are going well, but when it's not, the combination of only the upper deck cheering (and even then not that hard) and the sheer size of the venue makes it seem like a morgue.

A Jays Fan response to your points: 1. If you can outrebound us, at home, with our two big guys up front, then you've really done something. Rebounding, especially on the defensive end, is one of the things we did best last year. Rather than press, we mostly just let teams come up the court, then we hunkered down on D (sort of) and really got after it on the boards, limiting second chances severely. A good goal might be to have more offensive rebounds than we do, because we shoot a pretty good percentage (esp at home) and that'll limit your defensive rebounding some if we manage to do that. 2 and 4. We really don't foul an awful lot. It's a product of the way we play. An individual or two on our team might get into foul trouble, but you won't get to the line a lot. We get to the line a decent piece; not a ton, but enough that we'll likely shoot more FTs than you will (or any opponent we play, really) due to our styles. Basically, we're not defensively aggressive enough (save for Echenique) to run up a big foul total. And Doug will let a guy score outright rather than risk a foul that puts him into trouble. Your best bet on him is to get one early foul and then have him get a loose ball foul or something like that. Put it this way: he was only on the bench with foul trouble in two games last year that I can remember, and both of those second fouls were either loose balls or charges or illegal screens or something non-traditional. He's more or less under the Jimmer rule: don't guard a guy if a foul is possible, and one more will put you on the bench. Very tough to get him out that way. 3. You will win the turnover battle. We don't have nearly enough on-ball pressure to force turnovers, or at least not last year. We were like 300something in turnovers. What'll happen is you'll win, but it'll be, like 11 turnovers to 6, where the totals for both sides are low (but could go up since it's the first game). 5. It would obviously help if you guys shoot the lights out, but we're gonna play man. It's not like you can't do anything down low. In fact I'd prefer you try to hit from deep I think; Echenique can be foul prone and the more you keep it out of the lane the better it is for him, because we will need him to come up big tonight. Hope that helps.

This is a very astute comment. The first sentence is basically our whole plan (at least it was last season): we score efficiently and do pretty well on the offensive glass, magnifying that. On D, we try to hit the glass hard and not foul; that led to some less-than-impressive defensive stats (and unfortunately some standing around, waiting for them to hurry up and take their one shot) since intense pressure wasn't what was necessary. Even with the increased FG% other teams got, it wasn't enough, since we were getting 4-6 more offensive rebounds while shooting 50%, and getting to the line more than they were. That was our whole MO. Getting McD into foul trouble isn't the path you should take IMO. Doug doesn't play much D. He's under the Jimmer rule: DONT GET INTO FOUL TROUBLE, you're too important on O. He'll mix it up a little in the first half until he picks up his first foul, at which point he plays D stationary, with his arms extended but little lateral movement, and for the rest of the first half. No slapping, no reaching, just space occupation. How can you get another foul that way? I can only remember two games when Doug got two first half fouls, one of which was the Northwestern game where he was given two absolutely BS calls. It's too bad Doug gets such a bad defensive rap, because one of the reasons we take a giant step forward defensively in the last 10 minutes of games is he takes off the brakes on his defense at about the 10 minute mark, where he usually has only one (or sometimes zero) fouls accumulated at that point and can really body it up more. He CAN do it; he just...doesn't. Or at least he hasn't. Maybe that'll change with the new season some. Echenique, on the other hand, is the guy you should attack. He's as strong as an ox and a lot of ticky tack fouls get called on him just due to his size and general bruising nature, and he acts as Doug's enforcer when McD is playing the oak tree D. He'll help out a lot and hide McDermott on defense - but only if he's in there. If he's on the bench and Artino is in, and Doug has a first half foul, well, you could have 45 at halftime.

If you can at all avoid it, don't buy our feed. It's atrocious.

McDermott scores down low because his footwork is sublime, and he often gets himself into a position to where he can't miss once he gets the rock. He can get up there and score with either hand, but putting himself into point-blank position is the hallmark of his post game. Henson and Zeller stopped him from doing that all that often when we played UNC last season in the tourney, and even though Doug got 20 he had to fight like hell to get it. If your coach has some stones he'll put your best post defender on him, even if it's risking fouls on Mitchell (assuming he's your best). You're gonna have to push out on the shooters (or just hope they miss, which some teams chose to do, and lost almost every time in doing so), so doubling him can be problematic. Putting your best foot forward and accepting the possibility that it goes badly is your best bet if you want to stop everybody we have. It's what UNC did.

We play man. When the man-to-man D is sucking, the coaches get on the player's cases, send them back out there, and play more man-to-man. It has to be a looming disaster to get us to go to a zone, like, say, potentially getting blown out by Alabama in the NCAAs. That got us into a zone. But apart from that, it'll be man, even if you're having decent success solving it - the attitude is (or at least was last year), we'll just outscore the opponent anyway. Much more important to CU's philosophy is limiting trips to the foul line, and maximizing our defensive rebounding percentage, than things like field goal percentage - and we were good at both of those things last year. Plus that philosophy kept us out of foul trouble, which helped us big late in games. I will say that greatly improving the defense was an overarching mantra this offseason. So I'd imagine it'll be better than what we have on tape, but how much better remains to be seen. Oh and section 202jay has it right, if things go like they have been, one of your shooters will just BLOW UP. It happened all the time last year - career highs every other game for someone. I've never seen guys get into zones the way individual players did last season. Drew Crawford of Northwestern and Colt Ryan from Evansville just went nuts.