HuskerBB

Did we call that time out? We needed to inbound it first so we could take Wilhelm back out for offense. They put him in to rebound the FT - but I would really rather not have him in now.

Bryce got shoved about 3 feet on that drive.

No one said it was reffed the same on both ends - clearly it has not been.

Why do they keep saying Kobe was ejected when he is clearly right on the bench. Verge needs to realize that no matter what they do his is not going to get a call on a drive.

Absolutely no way we were going to get a call there. We should have known that at this point.

Yeah - was not a bad shot so probably needed to take it give we were behind. But would certainly have preferred for it to happen later.

Horrible charge call - the announcer is dead wrong! But was a bad play by Verge also.

Glad to get the call - but they have traveled much worse than that many times earlier.

As bad as the ref's have been I don't blame the fight on that part. It was just Lat being stupid right in front of their bench.

If they were calling it close there would have been about 3 fouls on our last possession - including an "and 1" for Verge

Refs are certainly doing everything possible to help out NC St. We get shoved all over and no call - but lots of ticky-tack stuff gets called on the other end.

That was all ball !!

Have they said anything about Andre? He clearly should have been ejected as he ran from the bench right into the melee.

Fred just laughing about how bad the officiating is (although I did think they handled the fight part pretty well).

Mayen is going to get ejected - but hopefully the guy that came up and bumped him will also. The Cam Hayes guy really is the one who made it bad - although Mayen's little elbow started it.

Verge got mugged - how is that not a foul?

Is it just me or have they missed 3 very obvious NC St traveling calls in the last 2 minutes.

Not saying I was pleased with the game tonight - but certainly not as depressed as the rest of you seem to be. I don't think this team is quite as bad as their Kenpom rating indicated - sounds like they really got homered at South Dakota (had a double digit lead before 2 technical fouls before half and SD shot something like 40 free throws). In any event they shot really well - some of that was bad defense to be sure - but even at that they shot very well at least in the first half so I thought they also played over their head a little bit. I also thought we came out really pretty well. Had good possessions early. Problem was really when we brought the first subs in and got really lazy on defense. My main comments - Alonzo Verge took a lot of criticism on this board early this year - but he was very good tonight - by far our best player and we likely don't win the game without him playing at a high level. Second - Derek Walker is far and away our best post player contrary to what lots of people were saying on this board a week or two ago. He is a bit undersized but he battles hard and is really skilled both as a passer and at finishing. We are just now figuring out how to use him in the offense to play to his strengths - and that bodes well for the future to some extent. I do think most everyone probably had too high of expectations for the team - but frankly that is human nature. We do have holes and are still a very poor rebounding team. Bryce has great flashes but has not figured out yet how to play hard off the ball and on defense. I like what Keon brings but he is not comfortable on offense yet. CJ is good in flashes also but falls asleep on defense at times and also has really poor rebounding fundamentals. This was a game where we shot poorly both from 3's and at the line - when the opponent shot over their heads at least a little - yet we still found a way to win - not comfortably but really should have been by 10 had we made FTs at the end.

Those two calls - both fouls on Bryce were huge - and both were really bad calls. Not sure how they called the one a block - had to be that they did not think he gave the guy room to turn because he certainly was set and appeared to be outside the circle. The baseline drive in the 2nd half where they called a charge was a horrible call. Ref on the baseline had a bad angle and apparently thought Bryce was moving into the defender when I could tell from my angle if anything the defender moved in to cause whatever contact was there. Like they often do the ref assumed something was going to happen and made a call without see what actually happened (sort of like the foul they called on CJ when he contested a breakaway layup in the first half and literally never touched the guy at all).

Depressing - I think we have better players but Creighton clearly had a better team. I can only assume that Fred is too attached to an NBA type offense and needs to adjust back to college. In the NBA you play 2 or 3 man offensive systems that start with dribble drives. But we don't have NBA players. Creighton runs an offense that had 5 guys moving all the time - with lots of off ball screens to get the offense moving. We don't do anything until someone starts a dribble drive and I don't think we ever set a screen for anyone who does not have the ball. Fred needs to spend some time watching this film and find a way to get some semblance of the ball movement - and player rotation that you see in good college offenses. At one point I thought we must think we are playing football - can only have 1 guy in "motion' at a time :). I actually think maybe Verge learned something tonight. He was very frustrated - but I think that was due to him sort of knowing he should not be doing what he was doing -but also not knowing what else to do. I understand the people saying he is not a PG because he certainly is not trying to run an offense that gets everyone involved which is what you want your PG to do. But - I sure don't see how he was a D-1 "shooting guard" either because he looks like the last guy on the team we would want taking jump shots. I actually think he has PG skills (ball handling and passing ability) but he just doesn't know how to play PG - and that is on Fred - and Fred's "offense". Verge is really very good at beating his guy off the dribble - but after watching the CU and West Ill game films they also know that as long as you cover the screener to take away that pass off the pick and roll and help off enough to contest the shot at the bucket you have taken away his game completely. That said I don't know whether he is 100% to blame for not making the pass to anyone else - because when we run that pick and roll the other 3 guys just stand around watching and none of them seem to be trying to get themselves open. Bryce is extremely talented in some ways - but also very raw and lacking in others. If we could get him to play as hard as his brother does we might have something. He really struggles on the defensive end and while his athleticism gets him some rebounds his rebounding fundamentals are really lacking. I am kind of hoping that Trey will really push him while he has to sit and watch now and get him to understand that playing at this level requires 100% effort 100% of the time no matter how gifted you are athletically. The most frustrating thing though is how he disappears at the end of games. He had 25 points in the Western Illinois game - but did nothing in the last 5 minutes of that game. Tonight with 6 minutes left I told my friend that if Bryce is really an NBA player he needs to take over the game now. But he barely even touched the ball the rest of the game. Obviously a lot of that is on Verge not sharing anything. We need to make Verge understand that his (and most everyone else's) primary job really needs to be to find a way to help get the most out of the skills that Bryce has. Particularly at the end of close games he needs to be the one taking a leading role in games. That said - I understand it is his 3rd college game - but great players are not afraid to put the team on their back. I don't get the criticism of Walker. He did struggle at times tonight - but the CU big guy is actually a handful - much bigger and very disciplined. What I liked is for the first time this year we let Walker do what he perhaps does best on offense - get the ball in the high post and pass to cutters. He did that quite a bit last year - but we have not done that at all this year until a couple times tonight. I don't care that he did not score much - his scoring should only come in getting 2nd chance points and passes off pick and rolls (if we ever get to a point where the opponent does not focus on taking that away). Walker is undersized a bit - but he does play hard. I do think Andre needs to be in the rotation and he does good things - primarily bringing alot of energy to the floor. But he really struggled in the first half at times also and just is not nearly as sound fundamentally as Walker at this point. Overall I can't say that I expected to win going in - but I also think the reason we did not is almost fully due to our inability or unwillingness to play as a team. That is on Fred to a large extent - but the players need to realize that as well.

Really disappointing result. I think Fred (like me) kept thinking we would wake up enough to pull out a win. Actually would have except for the sudden inability to make free throws at the end and the 2 bombs thrown in by Western Carolina at the end - the 2nd one by a guy who likely would never make that shot more than 1 in 10 times. That said our performance was abysmal. Apparently after getting badly outrebounded in the win over Colorado we reached the conclusion that rebounding doesn't matter. If you wanted to grade our rebounding effort tonight it would be impossible because an F isn't bad enough to describe it. I do think Walker tried to get boards and Verge obviously had a high rebound total - but the other guys absolutely made no effort at all to block anyone out on the defensive side. Offensively it certainly seemed that our only offensive play was to let either Verge or Bryce get a pick from Walker and drive to the hoop to throw up whatever they could get off toward the basket - while the other 3 guys literally just stood and watched that happen. No ball movement and no movement without the ball. Even the one time late when Wilcher did get a kick out he was completely out of position to take a shot. Of course I can understand by that point why he was surprised to get the ball on offense. Verge and Bryce are both very talented - but hope they learned tonight that for the team to be successful they have to acknowledge they have teammates and maybe even let them participate in the offense once in awhile. But you do wonder why Fred just let them continue to do the same thing over and over without trying to run an offense. Before the last possession when we were in the timeout the guy next to me said that whatever Fred was drawing up what is going to happen is Verge is going to get the ball and drive to the basket and put up whatever he can get off without even looking to pass to anyone else. That is even harder to do successfully when everyone on the arena - including the Western Illinois coaches and players - knew that was exactly what was going to happen. All that said - if our only offense was going to be to have someone drive to the hoop and take whatever shot they could get - why did Bryce stop being an option to do that the last 4 minutes. While that is not what I would have wanted to see - it would have been better to see Bryce be involved in some way down the stretch because he was at least our most effective option in that "role" up to that point. You can learn alot from games like this - and hopefully we will learn some lessons from it. Problem is that losses in games like this really haunt you all season. People forget narrow wins against mediocre teams early in the season. But losses to this kind of opponent stick out like a really sore thumb when you look at a team's "resume" at the end of the year.

Andre was in the regular team sweats and participated in warmups. I assume he had his uniform on under the sweats but he never took them off so guess we don't know for sure. But by all appearances at the game he was available. Webster and Mayan were both in street clothes.

I was traveling today so missed the game. Is there a way to watch the BTN+ stream later when I get home?

I get that they would have that information - but transferring the tickets doesn't mean they are sold - lots of people share tickets or just give them to their children etc most of the time. Also FWIW pretty sure the ticket office is aware that many people sell their season tickets to others. I know people who have been buying season tickets from others for over 20 years - both in football and basketball. I don't think that would be news to anyone in the ticket office. Would be pretty unreasonable for them to change their position on that now.

Have not seen the basketball tickets - but in the past they have been color printed with some sort of design. Football tickets were more colorful and elaborate. This year the printed versions are very small and vanilla. Maybe because the original plan was to not do paper tickets at all and when they changed direction on that to allow paper tickets they did not have the time or the budget to do anything fancier. Another possibility is that keeping them simple is just a further step toward weening people off paper tickets. FWIW we went the eticket route this year mostly because I knew it was going to come eventually so thought we would bite the bullet. Turns out that I like it alot. Much easier to transfer tickets to other people that way so it is great if you share tickets in a group.