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A native of the Midwest, Corn played for Bartow at Memphis State in the early 1970s but transferred to Division II Missouri Southern after Bartow took the job at Illinois; five years later, he received a phone call from his first college coach, who was looking for help jumpstarting a program with just a single season of history to its name. Unaware that Bartow’s offer would shape the next decade of his life, Corn packed his bags and moved to Birmingham.

It didn’t take long for both the Blazers and Corn to realize a great deal of success. By 1981, Bartow’s squad had secured its first of seven consecutive NCAA Tournament berths, knocking off Kentucky en route to the Sweet Sixteen; the following season, UAB pulled off a titanic upset of Ralph Sampson’s Virginia Cavaliers and reached the Elite Eight in just its fourth year of existence. At the same time, Corn was steadily working his way up the ladder, promoted to full-time assistant in 1981 and named Bartow’s top assistant by 1983.

The position came with significant responsibilities and lofty expectations — Lee Hunt, who left UAB for the head coaching job at Ole Miss, was described by Bartow as “one of the great basketball coaches in the country” — but Corn was up to the task. Over the next six years, he played an instrumental role in recruiting, among others, Steve Mitchell, Alan Ogg, Reginald Turner, Anthony Gordon, and Michael Charles, putting together a resume that vaulted him into consideration for head coaching jobs of his own. In 1989, Corn returned home to take the reins at his alma mater, where he remained for 25 seasons, ultimately earning induction into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame.

38 years later, Bartow’s protégé is losing a trusted assistant of his own. Over the last six seasons, UAB associate head coach Ryan Cross has helped import and develop some of the most impactful players in UAB history. Now, following in the footsteps of Hunt and Corn, he’s been handed the keys to his own program.

Great staffs win games, but great staffs also serve as talent incubators. An impressive, underdiscussed aspect of Bartow’s UAB tenure is how many of his assistants went on to become college head coaches:

• Larry Finch, an assistant on the Blazers’ inaugural squad, later led Memphis from 1986-1997.

• Decades after serving as a graduate assistant under Bartow, former UAB player Chris Giles became the head coach of DII Miles College in 2006.

• Dan Monson, another of Bartow’s graduate assistants, has been a head coach at Gonzaga, Minnesota, Long Beach State, and Eastern Washington (where he remains today).

• Mike Hanks, who joined the Blazers’ staff after head coaching stints at Samford and South Alabama, went on to take the reins at DII St. Leo in 1996.

• Bill Walker, yet another former UAB graduate assistant, has been a head coach at DII Illinois-Springfield and is currently in charge at DII Missouri S&T.

• Onetime Bartow graduate assistant Jim Harter spent 16 years as the head coach at DII Pace University.

• The aforementioned Lee Hunt left Birmingham to take over Ole Miss’ program in 1982 and later became the winningest coach in UMKC history.

• Following a four-year stint with the Blazers, John Prince was named Jackson State’s head coach in 1986.

• The aforementioned Robert Corn was in contention for several HC jobs before landing at DII Missouri Southern.

• Murry Bartow, of course, succeeded his father at UAB and enjoyed a fruitful stint at ETSU.

The last four of those names — Hunt, Prince, Corn, and the younger Bartow, if you’re counting him — were plucked into their new roles directly off the elder Bartow’s staff. Although plenty of coaching talent has graced Bartow Arena since its namesake retired, few others have managed to jump straight from UAB to a men’s college head coaching job: Mike Anderson assistant Giles was hired by Miles in 2006, Mike Davis assistant Kerry Rupp was hired by Louisiana Tech in 2007, Jerod Haase assistant Rob Ehsan (again, if you’re counting him) succeeded his boss at UAB in 2016, and that’s the list.

At least, that was the list until last Wednesday. Cross’ achievement puts him — and Kennedy, whose staff he came from — in rare company among UAB coaches, an indicator of the Blazers’ pronounced post-2020 success.

“I’ve learned so much working for [Kennedy], his approach … He is relentless every day in his pursuit of us being the best version of ourselves,” Cross said at his ULM introductory press conference. “ … So much respect, so much appreciation for Andy Kennedy and what he’s done for me in my career.”

What exactly, the uninitiated might ask, did Cross accomplish at UAB? Does his name really deserve to be mentioned in the pantheon of Blazer coaches? Without even factoring in the program’s accomplishments over the past six seasons — the .701 winning percentage, the conference titles, the NCAA Tournament appearances — the answer to that question is yes, based solely on Cross’ record of talent acquisition and development.

Take a look at UAB’s last six rosters and pick out your favorite players. Former ULM guard Michael Ertel, the Blazers’ leading scorer during Kennedy’s first year at UAB? He followed Cross, who served as a ULM assistant for nearly a decade before joining Kennedy’s staff, from Monroe to Birmingham in 2020. Quan Jackson, one of the great defenders in the history of Blazer basketball? He was recruited to UAB thanks in part to his existing relationship with Ertel. Jordan Walker, Eric Gaines, and Chance Westry? All signed with help from Cross.

That’s just the beginning. Perhaps’ Cross greatest contributions to UAB basketball came in the form of his connections to the junior college ranks, forged by stints as the head coach at Barton County CC (1998-1999) and Chipola College (1999-2003). When nationwide roster retention rates collapsed and the era of unrestricted player movement began in earnest around 2023, the Blazers found themselves leaning more and more on a robust JUCO pipeline, a strategy that allowed them to keep pace with far better-funded rivals. UAB’s 2023-2024 team featured three of the top 15 junior college players in the nation — Alejandro Vasquez, Christian Coleman, and Yaxel Lendeborg, the last of whom became arguably the single best player in school history — and its 2024-2025 roster was bolstered by the addition of point guard Ja’Borri McGhee, a South Plains College alumnus. Take a guess at which Blazer assistant led the charge on those recruitment efforts.

Very few coaches across UAB history have helped fill the Blazers’ coffers to the extent Cross has.

For all parties, what comes next is unclear. After over three decades in the business, Cross has at last obtained a Division I head coaching job; however, he now faces down the daunting task of making ULM — long regarded as one of the nation’s hardest places to win — competitive. The Warhawks posted a 4-28 record last season while finishing 352nd in KenPom and haven’t cracked .500 since before Cross and Ertel left for UAB. Cross has previously borne witness to a turnaround: when he arrived at ULM as an assistant in 2012, the program was crippled by APR sanctions and despondent, but the Warhawks soared to an all-time school record of 133rd in KenPom by 2016. Replicating that feat in today’s landscape, though, may prove more challenging.

As for UAB, there are obvious questions to be answered. Among others: who replaces Cross? What will the Blazers’ staff hierarchy look like next season? How does Cross’ departure affect efforts to retain players like Westry and Salim London? How does Cross’ departure affect UAB’s approach to JUCO recruiting?

The ULM job also opened last offseason, and Cross’ name came up then, too, so his departure doesn’t come as a shock; some sort of contingency plan is certainly in place. With the busiest recruiting weeks of the year quickly approaching, however, UAB must immediately put its preparation on display.

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To bring us full circle, for what it’s worth: the season after Corn departed, Bartow’s Blazers didn’t miss a beat, winning 22 games, dominating the Sun Belt with a 12-2 record, and taking home a conference title. Let’s hope history repeats itself.

Eric Konkol was a main character of the Ehsan and early Kennedy eras, the architect of the Louisiana Tech teams that gave UAB some of its most memorable battles of the last decade.

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However, since he left Tech for Tulsa in 2022 and UAB joined the American in 2023, Konkol and his Golden Hurricane program have been all but forgotten, shunted into irrelevance by Memphis, North Texas, Florida Atlantic, and South Florida.

It does bring me some degree of joy to announce that Konkol has at last returned to prominence, putting together a cadre of sharpshooters that rolled through the non-conference slate like a knife through hot butter — the Golden Hurricane’s sole loss came in immensely unlucky fashion against erstwhile Tulsa guard PJ Haggerty and his Kansas State squad. Say what you will about Konkol as a coach — the sheen of his Louisiana Tech accomplishments has somewhat dimmed after his struggles in the American — but what Tulsa (KenPom #77, higher than all of its conference peers but South Florida) has accomplished this year is unambiguously impressive.

The question of whether Tulsa is for real is still unanswered, especially after the Golden Hurricane fell to North Texas and USF in back-to-back outings. Is the jump-shooting regression monster coming for Tulsa, and if so, can they survive it? Whatever the answer to that question may be, UAB needs to beat Konkol’s squad today if the Blazers truly want to contend for a conference title. Just like old times.

Tulsa Offense

This unit is an absolutely devastating one, the most effective offense Tulsa has fielded since the days of Buzz Peterson and Bill Self. The Golden Hurricane have been quick to take triples during the Konkol era, but they’ve never had the personnel to do it efficiently — until now. After several years of underwhelming offensive showings, Tulsa struck gold in the transfer portal, constructing an analytically pure, rim-and-three-oriented attack that attempts just 11.1% of its field goals from the midrange. Konkol’s squad ranks 45th in the country (and first in the conference) in KenPom offensive rating, having nailed a nation-leading 41% of its three-pointers.

You may remember Ian Smikle (4.4 PPG, 4.2 RPG), Tulsa’s starting center during the 2024-2025 campaign and the only TU player to score more than ten points during the Golden Hurricane’s most recent visit to Bartow Arena, in which they were thrashed 83-51. He returns, as does forward Tyler Behrend (5.3 PPG, 4.1 RPG), who saw little playing time last year but has now become the Golden Hurricane’s starting five. However, neither man is a floor-stretcher, and thus neither man takes many shots in the new-look Tulsa attack, which has all but eschewed post-ups and rolls in favor of guard and wing-driven rim pressure, cuts from the perimeter, and catch-and-shoot triples.

Let’s start, ironically, with a guy who rarely shoots threes: guard Tylen Riley (14.5 PPG, 3.6 APG), who has become a breakout mid-major star after a forgettable two-year stint at Cal Baptist. Although Tulsa prefers to operate at a reasonably fast pace, they’re not the transition-obsessed unit they were in 2023-2024; Riley isn’t PJ Haggerty. Most of his touches come in the half court, where he serves as the fulcrum of Tulsa’s drive-and-kick offense, whirling around dribble handoffs and relentlessly attacking the bucket.

Riley isn’t a great finisher, but he draws free throws at a monstrous rate and makes them at a sparkling 87% clip. If the opposing defense overcommits, the pass-first Riley will kick it out to one of Tulsa’s many lethal shooters; per hoop-explorer, Riley is in the 99th percentile of drive-and-kick efficiency.

Riley boasts an assist rate of 27.1%, among the highest marks in the American. A 20.6% turnover rate is unsightly and, along with his lack of three-point shooting, represents perhaps Riley’s greatest offensive weakness. Nevertheless, his passing skills, along with the gravity he creates, shouldn’t be discounted, as Riley is able to pound the rim, find open perimeter shooters, and hit cutters like forward David Green (16.1 PPG, 4.9 RPG).

Green, who currently ranks third on KenPom’s all-conference team, is the next player UAB has to worry about — he’s shooting 64.7% from three in American play. The Rhode Island transfer is a pure scorer, a 6’7”, 225-pound wing/forward who drains triples at a 39.2% clip, a strong rim attacker who connects on 62% of his two-pointers, Tulsa’s best scorer off offensive rebounds, and an intimidating force in transition.

Beside Riley in the backcourt is guard Miles Barnstable (13.7 PPG, 1.8 APG), a hyper-efficient catch-and-shoot threat who has made 42.2% of his triples and 94.1% (!!!) of his free throws on the year. Barnstable primarily lives behind the arc, but he’s also capable of attacking the rim and kicking it out to shooters. His KenPom player comparison, coincidentally, is a supercharged version of Tony Toney.

Make sure you don’t come down under him — Barnstable leads Tulsa in fouls drawn on three-point attempts.

Wing Ade Popoola (9.5 PPG, 3.4 RPG), who we’ll talk about more later, is another perimeter-oriented guy you don’t want taking triples — he’s making 46.6% of them — although he struggles a little bit with turnovers. Fellow wing Myles Rigsby (8.8 PPG, 2.1 APG), who comes off the bench, is the rare member of this team who can’t shoot threes; however, he makes up for it with passing chops and impressive numbers as a cutter and a rim attacker.

One frustrating thing about playing Tulsa is that there’s never truly a moment of respite. Ten members of their rotation play more than 10 minutes per game, and other than Smikle, all of them have a positive EvanMiya OBPR. Forward Romad Dean (5.6 PPG, 3.8 RPG) is a pick-and-pop threat; true freshman guard Jaylen Lawal (7.9 PPG, 1.6 APG) is an improving driver, a capable passer, and a strong three-point shooter who recently dropped 25 points against Rice; wing KJ Martin (2.6 PPG, 2.1 RPG) has been solid in limited minutes. Practically all of the Golden Hurricane’s lineups can both pressure the rim and shoot the three.

Per hoop-explorer, UAB’s defense is most effective against frontcourt-driven actions like post-ups, of which Tulsa runs very few. A positive note, however: although the Blazers don’t have the best efficiency numbers at the cup, they’ve generally been pretty good about limiting opposing rim rates and forcing opponents to take tough two-point shots. In conference play, Riley has struggled to assert himself on drives, posting a two-point percentage of just 44.4%; while it will prove difficult for UAB to contain Green, who just scored 34 points against the Izaiyah Nelson-led USF frontline, there’s a path to limiting Tulsa’s interior effectiveness if UAB sticks with cutters, walls off the paint, and limits defensive fouls, all things Andy Kennedy’s squad is middling-to-good at.

At the end of the day, though, this one might come down to jump-shooting variance. North Texas managed to hold Tulsa to a season-low 14 three-point attempts during their win over the Golden Hurricane; it is unlikely the Blazers, who play much less drop defense than the Mean Green and generally give up a lot of unguarded triples, will be able to replicate that feat. If UAB wins the turnover battle and limits Tulsa on the offensive glass, two things they are fully capable of doing, they’ll put themselves in a position to win with a shot volume edge, but little else will matter if the Golden Hurricane shoot 45% on what will probably be 20 or more three-point attempts.

The question that will define the game: can Tulsa’s roster of players who combined to shoot about 36% from beyond the arc before this season maintain the best three-point percentage in program history? We’ll see later today!

Tulsa Defense

Last season, Tulsa fielded one of the worst defensive units in its proud history. Although the Golden Hurricane’s backline wasn’t quite as porous as those of Charlotte, Temple, and, disconcertingly, UAB, that wasn’t saying much. Eric Konkol’s squad finished the campaign ranked 244th in KenPom’s defensive efficiency metric, marking a steep fall from grace for a program that once ruled the WAC on the shoulders of intimidators like Eric Coley and Jerome Jordan.

Tulsa’s drop coverage, anchored by forwards Smikle and Jared Garcia, was effective in its intended purpose of denying opponents the rim and the three-point line: when facing the Golden Hurricane, American Conference teams attempted nearly 30% of their total field goals from the midrange. However, Tulsa’s foes made those jumpers at a reasonably high clip, and when they actually reached the rim, it wasn’t pretty for TU.

That’s not to mention offensive rebounding — Golden Hurricane opponents scored a whopping 18.9% of their points on second-chance opportunities. You may recall UAB’s aforementioned 83-51 beatdown of Tulsa, during which the Blazers shot 70% at the rim while posting 17 second-chance points.

Despite retaining Smikle and Behrend, Tulsa has (understandably) scratched last year’s system. No longer is TU’s defensive identity oriented around forcing midrange jumpers; instead, the Golden Hurricane welcome the triple while denying interior shots. Through four games of conference play, Tulsa’s opponents have launched three-pointers on a sky-high 46.4% of their field goal attempts, an eye-popping number when compared to last season’s mark of 36.4%. On drives, defenders are in the gaps early, walling up to prevent easy paint access.

Although no one is going to mistake Tulsa for a defensive powerhouse — for the second consecutive campaign, the Golden Hurricane are the American’s eighth-ranked team in KenPom defensive efficiency — the new strategy has paid dividends for Konkol’s squad, as it allows about 3.5 fewer points per 100 possessions than it did in 2024-2025. Tulsa has also used increased defensive rebounding and steal rates to increase the efficiency of its once-mediocre transition attack.

That steal rate is less the product of Tulsa’s system (the Golden Hurricane’s overall defensive turnover rate lingers at a middling 16.2%, and although Tulsa occasionally deploys a three-quarter press, they force few turnovers with it) and more the product of ballhawking, aggressive wings Popoola and Rigsby, the latter of whom rocks the highest steal percentage (4.0%) in the conference. You don’t have to watch a whole lot of Tulsa basketball to see who has the most active hands on the floor:

Although Tulsa’s scheme doesn’t call for much ball pressure, Popoola and Rigsby will take advantage of opportunities to be aggressive. Unsurprisingly, the Golden Hurricane’s wing duo is excellent at the point of attack, and the pair is often deployed against the opponent’s best dribble penetrators and ball-screen operators. Blessed with multiple capable ballhandlers, UAB boasts the lowest offensive steal percentage of any team in the conference, but the matchup of Westry/Robinson against Popoola/Rigsby is nevertheless one to watch.

Speaking of ball-screen operators, the Blazers’ pick-and-roll teams are primarily going to run into an aggressive drop coverage that sees Behrend/Smikle meet the handler near the level of the screen before backpedaling.

This differs from the drop Tulsa deployed last year because, in this case, the five-man is not content to sit back and allow the handler to work in the midrange; instead, the five-man confronts the handler, all but ignoring the roller until the handler picks up the ball (or until the on-ball defender fully recovers to the handler). This is not a trap or a hedge — Behrend/Smikle do not move above the level of the ball screen — but it is a way to discourage an off-the-dribble three-pointer and to prevent an open midrange jumper (the kind that would be encouraged by a deeper drop).

Thus, it’s not much of a surprise that Tulsa opponents take midrange jumpers on just 20% of their field goal attempts and only make 33.3% of them — the eighth-lowest mark in the nation, per hoop-explorer.

The elephant in the room: what happens to the ignored roller? Drop principles still apply — a tagging defender from the weak side provides help and tries his best to prevent the completion of a pocket pass — but if the handler manages to get the ball to the roller, devastation can occur, especially because Tulsa’s big men aren’t fantastic in rim defense (the Golden Hurricane allow an ugly 60% opposing shooting percentage at the cup) or as movers in space.

In their recent win over Tulsa, North Texas put up a scorching 1.36 points per possession on big cut-and-rolls, per hoop-explorer. Mean Green guards Je’Shawn Stevenson and David Terrell navigated the aggressive drop and connected multiple times with rolling forwards Josiah Shackleford and Dylan Arnett. At one point early in the second half, Stevenson threw a perfect pass to lifting guard Cole Franklin, unmarked on the weak side because his defender was tagging Shackleford. Before the Golden Hurricane could get set again, Franklin drove into the paint and kicked the ball out to forward Buddy Hammer for three.

North Texas provided UAB with a replicable blueprint to score against the Golden Hurricane; it helps that the Blazers possess multiple effective passers and rollers in Westry/Robinson and Lindsay-Martin/Rivera. Overall, signs are good for UAB’s big men: although Tulsa doesn’t allow many offensive rebounds, they’re one of the nation’s least efficient teams against putbacks, and they’re only moderately effective against post-ups, of which the Blazers run a lot of (although the Golden Hurricane tend to bring help against post-ups, and none of UAB’s bigs are fantastic passers).

In more discouraging news: someone, anyone on this team is going to have to make a three. Tulsa’s willingness to bring help into the gaps leaves them reasonably vulnerable to drive-and-kick triples, but UAB doesn’t generate many of those; the Golden Hurricane have been absolutely burned by self-created threes off the dribble, but, per hoop-explorer, there is not a single shot the Blazers have made at a less efficient clip than the off-the-dribble three.

South Florida beat Tulsa thanks to ten (!) triples from old friend Wes Enis, while North Texas, one of the few American teams that might be worse at shooting than UAB, knocked off the Golden Hurricane on the back of an eight-of-18 (44.4%) performance from beyond the arc. The Blazers can put themselves in a position to win by limiting turnovers, grabbing offensive rebounds, and feeding their big men down low, but this one, as previously stated, might come down to jump-shooting variance.

With Tulsa’s offense likely to bomb away, it’s difficult to see UAB’s path to victory if they don’t get at least one performance in the vein of Quaran McPherson against USF.

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Despite leading by as much as 16, the Blazers ferreted away their sizable lead in the second half, getting outscored by 18 and outrebounded by eight in one of their worst stretches of the campaign. Shotmaking, defense, energy; every aspect of UAB’s performance was scrutinized by a frustrated Kennedy.

“We’ve got to grow up,” Kennedy said. “We’ve got to understand that no one is going to give you anything, nor should they. And you’ve got to earn it, and just because you were the better team for about 20 minutes today doesn’t mean anything. You’ve got to keep playing.”

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Kennedy shouldered partial responsibility for the Green and Gold’s slow start to league play, accepting blame for UAB’s failure to adequately defend Wichita State guard Kenyon Giles, the conference’s leading scorer. Giles sank the Blazers with a game-high 26 points and drained eight triples, including two daggers down the stretch.

However, the Blazers’ coach didn’t shy away from challenging his players. Much of Kennedy’s ire was directed at guard Chance Westry, who posted four points and zero rebounds over 31 minutes. According to Kennedy, the Blazers seemed “hesitant in that paint, hoping, praying, you know, not making definitive plays,” issues he said could only be fixed by an increase in effort.

“I mean, there’s got to be a determination from within that they want to change,” Kennedy said.

How’s that for determination?

On the first Sunday of the new year, UAB was resolute, moving past Wednesday’s struggles with a heart-stopping, double-overtime road victory over South Florida. It would be a laughable understatement to say it wasn’t always pretty — at multiple points, television cameras captured a hopeless Kennedy staring off into the Yuengling Center bleachers — but the Blazers never quit, responding with haymakers every time their backs were pressed against the wall.

The game’s script was familiar. Competitive in the opening minutes, UAB fell behind after a sloppy start to the second half. South Florida controlled the boards, becoming the rare opponent to out-rebound UAB by double digits. USF guard Wes Enis was unguardable from beyond the arc, scoring 36 points on a whopping ten triples; in a manner reminiscent of WSU’s Giles, Enis drained a late-game three that seemed to be the dagger.

However, the fortitude UAB lacked against the Shockers was present in Tampa. In the face of overwhelming odds (less than three-in-100, according to KenPom), Kennedy’s squad managed to send the game to overtime after being down by 11 with less than six minutes left and down by five with less than 50 seconds left.

It got no easier from there, but, taking advantage of several mistakes made by the exhausted Bulls, UAB emerged from the marathon with its heads held high. In his postgame radio interview with David Crane and Steve Mitchell, Kennedy struck a markedly different tone than he did on December 31st.

“Despite getting out-rebounded by 12, despite losing 50-50 balls — actually, we won it by one — despite a lot of struggles offensively, which are kind of par for the course for this group, despite missing 12 free throws, including two front ends of one-and-ones, we won the most important category, and that was the one of determination,” Kennedy said. “I thought we were the most determined team, and I’m really, really proud of their fight.”

A Backyard Brawl

“Fight” is an appropriate descriptor of Sunday’s contest, which saw UAB and South Florida commit a combined 52 personal fouls and shoot a combined 79 free throws.

On paper, the game’s physical, paint-oriented nature favored the Bulls, a squad boasting two centers (6-foot-10 Izaiyah Nelson and 6-foot-9 Daimion Collins) taller than every player in the Blazers’ rotation. The second-shortest team in the American at full strength, UAB’s already-notable size issues were exacerbated by foul trouble, brought on by USF’s relentless rim attacks. With 7:40 remaining in regulation, Evan Chatman fouled out; with 54 seconds left in the first overtime, Daniel Rivera fouled out; 40 seconds later, Kyeron Lindsay-Martin fouled out. At the beginning of the final period, the 6’6” Westry was forced to take the tip for UAB, unsurprisingly losing to Nelson.

Nevertheless, the “Fighting Midgets,” as the Blazers were dubbed by Noah Dartmann, found a way to win, avoiding their first 0-2 start to conference play since the final campaign of the Ehsan era.

The Blazers’ height disadvantage certainly proved to be an obstacle. UAB gave up a season-high 17 offensive rebounds while grabbing just 12 of its own, losing the second-chance points battle 17 to 9. Nelson and wing Josh Omojafo wore down the Blazer backline all day long, combining to attempt 25 free throws and helping to drive Chatman, Rivera, and Lindsay-Martin out of the game. During the two overtime periods, Nelson took four trips to the line as Collins ripped down five boards against UAB’s gutted frontcourt.

However, the Blazers stayed afloat by limiting turnovers (committing eight to South Florida’s 14), getting high-leverage shotmaking from some unlikely suspects (we’ll get to that in a moment), and beating USF at its own game — drawing free throws.

“If we could get them to take a perimeter shot and we could secure the rebound, which was a problem for us all night, then I felt like offensively, we were going to be able to get some dribble penetration,” Kennedy said.

Despite suffering through a nightmarish afternoon from the floor, making just one of his 15 field goal attempts, Ahmad Robinson went eight-of-ten from the charity stripe. The probing Westry drew 13 free throws and drained eight of them, while Jacob Meyer went six-of-six from the line, converting multiple crucial and-one layups near the end of the game.

According to Kennedy, UAB’s frontcourt was “pretty effective” on offense — although Chatman was limited, Rivera put up an efficient 18 points, and Lindsay-Martin scored 11 off the bench — but the Blazers weren’t going to win unless their guards played bigger than their listed sizes, and did they ever. Behind the efforts of its backcourt, UAB generated 43 free throw attempts and made 31 of them; USF, conversely, finished 23-of-36 from the line. Meyer also posted a double-double, recording 11 rebounds in addition to his 19 points, while Robinson grabbed eight boards, half of them coming in the third and fourth periods.

Chance Westry Meets the Moment

In 2024, Nelson, USF guard Joseph Pinion, and USF coach Bryan Hodgson dealt UAB a backbreaking home loss while the trio was at Arkansas State. Sunday, the Blazers returned the favor.

Kennedy compared the two games in his presser, taking a playful shot at Westry in the process.

“Remember last year we were up like 20-something, and they came back and beat us when [Hodgson] was at Arkansas State in overtime?” Kennedy said. “That was probably about as improbable as us winning today. We look out there, we have to play basically two overtime periods with the tallest player on the floor being Chance Westry at 6-foot-6, and defensively, Chance plays at about 5-foot-6.”

As he’s made apparent, the UAB coach would have expressed it in much more explicit terms if he truly harbored frustration with Westry. After the Blazers’ December 14th loss to Troy, Kennedy called out the guard for a perceived lack of energy. Roughly two weeks later, he did the same thing, criticizing Westry for failing to corral a rebound during UAB’s loss to Wichita State.

Westry responded to Kennedy’s first challenge with a hyper-efficient, 31-point outing against Cleveland State. He answered his coach’s most recent call-out in a similar manner, pacing the Blazers with a team-high 24 points and six assists. Although he came off the bench for just the third time this season, benched in favor of Quaran McPherson, Westry displayed no signs of discouragement, immediately driving to the hoop and drawing a foul upon first entering the game. In combination with Lindsay-Martin, Westry gave the Blazers a much-needed early burst of energy.

Even in the second half, when his shot briefly stopped falling, Westry continued getting to the free throw line, tapping into the aggression Kennedy begged to see against Wichita State. Most critically, he served as the team’s go-to offensive option when it mattered most, posting 11 points on 100% shooting across the ten bonus minutes. He had a hand in UAB’s first eight points of the initial overtime and ultimately broke USF’s back in the final period, driving past an exhausted, flat-footed Pinion to give the Blazers a four-point lead that proved to be insurmountable.

Westry’s rebounding numbers still lagged — unlike his backcourt counterparts, he failed to dominate the glass, grabbing just two boards — but his hustle showed up on the defensive end, where he deflected several balls. With no hope of containing Nelson one-on-one with a foul-stricken frontcourt, UAB began deploying a 3-2 zone at the conclusion of regulation. Westry played a crucial role in heading the zone, which seemed to disrupt South Florida’s rhythm throughout both extra periods.

“Jacob [and] Chance I thought were really good with using hand-eye — length, as it relates to Chance — and getting our hands on some passes,” Kennedy said. “And then we had to go to that 3-2 zone, simply because we had no chance to guard them man-to-man. We went to the 3-2 zone, and I thought it was a really effective force in the overtimes.”

Roughly halfway into the season, it’s become clear that Westry is UAB’s best and most important player: he ranks second in the American Conference in Evan Miya’s BPR (behind only USF’s Nelson), and he leads the Blazers in Miya’s indispensability score by a significant margin. The Green and Gold will contend for a conference title if Westry continues playing like he did against South Florida, but that’s no guarantee: he hasn’t posted a triple-digit offensive rating in back-to-back games since November. Once again, Kennedy will be intently observing Westry during UAB’s Wednesday tilt against FAU.

Coming Up Clutch

UAB, notoriously, cannot make triples.

Westry, the Blazers’ leading scorer, has connected on eight of his 33 (24.2%) three-point attempts, while Meyer has made just 14 of 47 (29.8%). Although Chatman is capable of popping out to the perimeter, he’s still shooting 27% from beyond the arc. The team’s best shooter, therefore, is Robinson, who went 1-for-15 from the floor on Sunday. Ouch.

How, then, was UAB able to keep pace with a South Florida team whose starting shooting guard nailed ten triples on the afternoon? Not because of Meyer or Westry, who combined to go one-of-three from deep. Not because of Robinson, who, as one ESPN commentator put it, found himself unable to hit the side of a barn.

No — the Blazers’ Enis equivalent was McPherson, a man that entered the game having made two three-pointers on the season. In UAB’s loss to Wichita State, the Northern Illinois transfer was allocated just three minutes of playing time, a sight that has become familiar during the 2025-2026 campaign. Although McPherson saw stretches of usage against UNC Asheville, Cleveland State, and High Point, he’s been forced adapt to a new role after previously serving as one of NIU’s top offensive options, typically on the floor for roughly 20% of a given game, give or take a few minutes.

On a hunch, however, Kennedy gave McPherson his first start of the year against South Florida, sending him onto the floor in place of Westry.

It’s safe to say Kennedy’s instincts paid off. McPherson played a season-high 23 minutes, posted a season-high 17 points, and shot a career-high 75% from the floor, making four out of five three-point attempts and two out of three two-point attempts. With UAB having missed six of its last seven field goals and the clock ticking under seven minutes in the first half, McPherson caught fire, draining three triples in a 90-second span.

The first was a spot-up from the left corner; the second was off a stepback at the top of the circle; the final was a spot-up from the same location. By the time all was said and done, McPherson had turned a five-point Blazer deficit into a two-point Blazer lead.

“What a game by Q, huh?” Kennedy said. “You know, Coach Bartow used to talk about trusting your gut, trusting the instincts. I went with him in that lineup because I just felt like he’s always got good energy, and he’s kind of — he’s always positive. I need him just to talk to me every once in a while … But man, I thought he gave us a great lift early.”

McPherson one-upped himself about 32 minutes of game time later, when the Blazers’ win probability had dropped to just 12.9% at the end of the first overtime. Down 94-91 with 40 seconds on the clock, UAB needed a bucket, but Meyer came up short on a three-pointer; however, in one of its many late-game miscues, South Florida knocked the rebound out of bounds and allowed the Blazers to try again. In perhaps the most important moment of his young UAB career, Salim London drove around Pinion and converted a difficult layup over Nelson, cutting the Bulls’ lead to one. USF’s Isaiah Jones split a critical pair of free throws on the other end, and with less than 15 seconds remaining, UAB had a chance to stay alive.

Robinson grabbed the defensive rebound and maneuvered his way into a near-empty paint; however, perhaps unwilling to test the hulking Nelson after an ice-cold afternoon, he found McPherson standing in the left corner. In accordance with the game’s theme, what happened next wasn’t pretty — a mishandled reception forced McPherson to step inside the arc and attempt the least analytically-friendly shot of all time — but it worked. UAB 95, South Florida 95. Double overtime.

“I was going to shoot a three at first, but I caught it and I kind of bobbled it,” McPherson told Steve Irvine in an interview you need to read in its entirety. “ … I went right, pulled up and knocked it down.”

It wasn’t just McPherson who produced a memorable moment under pressure. With 3.6 seconds left in regulation and UAB down 83-81, Rivera, a sub-50% free-throw shooter, went two-for-two from the charity stripe; a single miss almost certainly would’ve spelled the Blazers’ doom.

“Daniel with two huge free throws,” Kennedy said. “I mean, goodness gracious. I mean, again, a testament to how much he has really, really improved in that area from a confidence standpoint. Two huge ones.”

And so on, and so forth. With the Blazers trailing by three early in the second overtime and the game threatening to slip away, Robinson, who hadn’t yet connected on a field goal, stepped back and hit an enormous triple, evaporating what would prove to be USF’s final lead of the afternoon. Meyer’s entire night was a masterclass in clutch scoring — all 19 of his points came after halftime — but he saved his most determined effort for last, diving after a loose ball to seal the Blazers’ victory in double overtime. Nearly every member of UAB’s rotation made a play that, in a less eventful game, would have been discussed for days.

A team might look “determined” and “clutch” one week and uninterested the next; there is, of course, no guarantee that UAB continues to win close games through March or even through Saturday. But the Blazers succeeding in so many high-leverage situations — and Kennedy unreservedly praising his squad’s grit — is a positive sign, without a doubt.

Behind Enemy Lines

South Florida’s Hodgson on his team’s late struggles:

“Just costly, costly mistakes down the stretch … Unfortunately, we had a couple guys that didn’t have a great week of practice, weren’t very locked in, couldn’t go to them. You know, we had two freshman out there down the stretch, and we had five turnovers.”

“ … It seemed like every possession in those two overtimes and the end of regulation, every possession was just an and-one for them … That’s extremely soft, you know, to let guys score the basket, draw the foul … I think our bigs didn’t do a very good job of sprinting back and showing a presence at the rim. Our guards didn’t do a very good job containing the basketball. We just allowed them to get to the rim time, and time, and time again. For a team that doesn’t shoot the ball well, and we know that, they attack the rim. They’re number one in the country in rim shot percentage.”

“So obviously, that’s a high level basketball game. It’s a good team, good coach, good players. You know, I have a feeling that’s a team we could see three times this year, but we for sure have got them one more time at their place, and we’ve got to get a lot of things fixed before we head there.”

Other notes:

• Two out of UAB’s three leaders in rebounding rate were guards — Jacob Meyer (16%) and Ahmad Robinson (10.7%). The other was Chatman (13.4%), who grabbed five boards in just 19 minutes of playing time.

• Meyer and Chatman were particularly tenacious on the defensive end, posting defensive rebounding rates of 29.2% and 26.9%, respectively.

• Per KenPom, UAB’s 109 points are the third-most the Blazers have scored against a Division I opponent since 1996 (111 vs. Alabama State on 11/7/2022, 116 vs. Houston on 1/9/1999).

• Per KenPom, South Florida’s 106 points are tied for the most a team has scored against UAB since 1996 (Memphis, 106 on 3/3/24).

• Hodgson was right in that the Blazers now rank first in the country in rim shot percentage, with 46.2% of their total field goal attempts coming at the bucket, per CBB Analytics. When you’re on pace to post the worst team three-point percentage in program history, as UAB currently is, you might as well drive to the paint.

• After committing just five turnovers against UNC Asheville, seven against Wichita State, and eight against South Florida, UAB now leads Division I in offensive turnover rate at 12.7% percent. Kennedy’s teams have been known to take care of the ball, finishing top-55 nationally in offensive turnover rate in 2021, 2022, and 2025, but the Blazers are now on pace to surpass the sparkling 13.8% mark they posted last season.

• Only twice has UAB finished a season ranked first in a KenPom statistical category: in both 2003 and 2006, Mike Anderson’s “40 Minutes of Hell” squads paced the nation in defensive turnover rate, generating takeaways on over 27% of opposing possessions.

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Not visible in the box score, however: the key to the game Kennedy identified during his postgame presser.

“The way [UNC Asheville was] blitzing ball screens, they were really hedging that ball screen hard,” Kennedy said. “So, our guards, if we could get it out of there clean, we were going to have plays behind the [screen]. And that’s what happened all night.”

From the game’s opening seconds, the Blazers were able to generate consistent, reliable offense by exploiting their opponents’ ball screen coverage.

Moments after Daniel Rivera won the tipoff, Evan Chatman set a slip screen for Salim London on the left wing, pretending to screen UNCA guard DJ Patrick but instead cutting to the basket.

The simple action immediately prompted a communication breakdown amongst the Bulldogs. UNCA forward Myles Mayfield, Chatman’s defender, hedged the screen and jumped out to pressure London. Looking unsure of himself, Patrick, London’s defender, briefly followed Chatman before also getting in London’s face. No Bulldog tagged the streaking Chatman, who received a pass from London and scored one of the easier buckets he’ll get all season.

It was mistakes like these that hampered the visitors in the early going. On the following possession, another mishandled slip screen forced UNCA center David Hermes to scurry back to the hoop and foul Rivera in order to prevent a free layup. Less than a minute later, the Bulldogs aggressively hedged a Chance Westry-Rivera side pick-and-roll, only for a lack of help defense to generate a (missed) open triple for Chatman.

Although UNCA successfully blitzed Ahmad Robinson on the Blazers’ next trip down the court, stripping the UAB guard and converting his turnover into a transition layup, the Green and Gold’s backcourt otherwise navigated the ball screen pressure with composure. The slip screen continued to prove effective in defeating the Bulldogs’ hedges: at the 16-minute mark, UNCA guard Justin Wright and forward Toyaz Solomon forced Robinson to pick up the ball, but he made up for his earlier mistake by finding the rolling Chatman deep in the paint. The forward proceeded to muscle in a tough two-pointer. Soon after, a heavily-defended Westry delivered a beautiful pass to a slipping Rivera with a hand in his face.

Wary of Rivera, UNCA center Sage Tolentino hedged Robinson less aggressively on the Blazers’ next ball screen; Robinson made the Bulldogs pay by draining a triple.

UNCA suffered fewer and fewer coverage breakdowns as the game progressed, but their ball screen defense remained an Achilles’ heel. This was in large part due to the performances of UAB’s rollers, and specifically KyeRon Lindsay-Martin, who scored a game-high 24 points on 11-of-14 shooting. All of the forward’s first-half points (sans a last-second tip-in) came off of hedged ball screens. While Chatman and Rivera dove all the way to the hoop to score their early buckets, Lindsay-Martin twice found success operating in space — once at the 12:31 mark, when he received a pass on a short roll and converted a floater over Wright, and once at the 0:57 mark, when London dragged out a screen and found Lindsay-Martin for a midrange jumper.

Lindsey-Martin also found himself the beneficiary of an overaggressive hedge at the 10:31 mark that allowed Westry to spin away from two defenders, barrel downhill, and generate an open layup.

This technique — “rejecting” the screen, or catching the defense by surprise by going in the opposite direction of the screen — was used multiple times by both Westry and Robinson to create space and prevent the Bulldogs from deploying their preferred coverage. Even when it wasn’t presented with easy passes, the Blazer backcourt was rarely stumped or overwhelmed by UNCA’s pressure, firing back with rejections or fitting assists into tight windows.

In spite of the Bulldogs’ aggression, UAB committed turnovers on just two ball screens during the first half, with one an unforced Lindsey-Martin throwaway. The forward made up for it, however, on the other side of the break. The second period was slower-paced than its predecessor and saw the Blazers’ ball screen rate decline; on the occasions UAB did go to the ball screen, UNCA often displayed a more conservative drop coverage that succeeded in slowing down a Green and Gold offense perhaps running out of energy before Christmas break. Westry couldn’t finish over Mayfield at the 17:28 mark; Tolentino swatted Westry at the 12:57 mark; Mayfield denied Chatman at the 6:18 mark.

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Although Westry had his second-half moments, backing down Wright for a tough layup before rejecting another screen to get downhill and draw free throws, he made just one of his five field goal attempts. Robinson, on the other hand, found himself even more out of rhythm, connecting on just one of his eight field goal attempts. Deprived of the same looks available to them in the first half, neither Chatman nor Rivera scored a point. The only consistent source of production was Lindsay-Martin, who recorded 16 second-half points to his teammates’ combined 14.

Neither Tolentino nor Hermes, both of whom have three or more inches on Lindsay-Martin, could contain the self-described “dog” in drop coverage as he interspersed powerful rolls to the rim between transition dunks. In a fitting conclusion to his spectacular outing, Lindsay-Martin locked Patrick out of the play with an effective screen, beelined into the paint, and bailed out a pivoting Westry with a difficult, left-handed finish.

The Blazers didn’t reinvent the wheel on Sunday; rather, they attacked UNCA’s ball screen coverage with slips and rejections, got steady, composed play from their guards, and took advantage of impressive efforts from their rollers, especially Lindsay-Martin, who Kennedy said did a “terrific job” of “catching, of finishing in traffic.”

“It is a big confidence booster,” Lindsay-Martin said. “It just shows me and just reinstills in my brain, like, what I can do even if I’m not trying to score, just finding open spots and just being available and active. And that’s the kind of the mindset I went into today.”

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“John Calipari once said, ‘Man, you don’t have to make them all, but you damn sure can’t miss them all.’”

Invoking the legendary Arkansas coach, Andy Kennedy fittingly summarized UAB’s 94-70 blowout loss at N.C. State Friday night. The Blazers were helpless from the field and from the charity stripe, making four of their 25 three-point attempts (16%) and eight of their 14 free throw attempts (57.1%).

Although the Wolfpack didn’t light it up from behind the arc, either, finishing ten for 30 (33.3%) after a zero for 12 start, Will Wade’s squad connected on 18 of its 22 free throws (81.8%) and absolutely dominated the interior. Powered by the efforts of forwards Darrion Williams and Ven-Allen Lubin and guard Tre Holloman, NCSU posted a two-point percentage of 74.2%, the second-highest mark by a UAB opponent since 1996, according to KenPom.

But for about 15 minutes in the first half, it seemed as though UAB had a chance to pull off the upset. The second game of the Wade era saw the Lenovo Center bathed in red, an adoring crowd of 15,918 showering the coach with cheers on each of the many occasions he appeared on the Jumbotron; never was the building louder than when a camera followed Wade from the tunnel to the Wolfpack bench.

Wade’s aura of supreme confidence influenced all facets of the pregame presentation: an elaborate light show promised to deliver college basketball a “reckoning,” a message the NCSU faithful took to heart as they relentlessly jeered Kennedy, who played for the Wolfpack in 1987 before transferring to UAB. It was quite the change of pace for a Blazer squad that tipped off the season against Mississippi Valley State.

The Green and Gold met the moment, however, deploying a zone that threw the hosts out of sorts in the opening minutes. Daniel Rivera swatted Williams, a preseason All-American and Texas Tech transfer that came to Raleigh after accepting a lucrative NIL package. Chance Westry stripped the Wolfpack’s Quadir Copeland and went coast-to-coast for a layup. Although he committed two quick turnovers, Jacob Meyer made up for it with a masterful display of shooting, starting four for four from the field and scoring the Blazers’ first six points. At the U16 media timeout, UAB led 10-9, buoyed by an NCSU offense ice-cold from beyond the arc.

“I thought early in the game our zones bothered them a little bit, and we were able to score, which allowed us to get in our zones,” Kennedy said. “I thought Chance and Jacob Meyer — I didn’t think the moment was too big for them, and they were really on the attack, and then we were able to get back into the zone and had them a little disjointed. And that’s how we were staying in the game.”

A triple from Evan Chatman and two layups from Westry kept UAB competitive until the 6:25 mark; it was at that point the basket began expanding for the hosts. Paul McNeil hit the Wolfpack’s first three of the night, NCSU connected on two more triples over the next two minutes, and the crowd finally found its voice. Aided by a technical against a screaming Wade, UAB managed to stay within single digits of the Wolfpack, but the Blazers missed their final eight three-point attempts of the half, a sign of what was to come. A frustrating moment in the period’s waning seconds summed up UAB’s night: with his team down 41-33, Meyer put up a jumper that seemed to be through the rim before it rattled out.

“The reality is, we were down eight at the half,” Kennedy said. “The way that they had played, if we could have finished the half a little better, you know, that should have been a two, three, four-point game. We might have even could have taken the lead if we could make a shot. We go four for 25 from three, which is just going to be a recipe for disaster for a group that’s undersized already.”

On the other side of the break, the onslaught began. Rivera opened the second half with a layup that made the score 41-35, but the Blazers got no closer. From the 18:11 mark to the 4:55 mark, NCSU orchestrated a 39-17 run that blew UAB out of the building. The Wolfpack peppered the visitors with triples, making seven of its 14 three-point attempts in the second period, while still leaning on the paint-oriented strategy that brought it success in the first half, converting a whopping 11 of 12 two-point attempts.

The Blazers simply had no answers. Their second-half shooting numbers were almost identical to their first-half shooting numbers; that wasn’t enough. In the absence of a Lendeborg-like interior threat, UAB is heavily reliant on their guards, but it received little-to-no production from any but Westry after halftime. Robinson, in particular, was unlucky from the field, drawing the attention of the NCSU student section after airballing two consecutive three-point attempts. He finished with eight points on a team-low 20.8 eFG%.

“Ahmad Robinson is a guy that we brought in to to to be a scorer,” Kennedy said. “He’s a 17, 18 points per game guy, you know. You put bigger guys on him, you know, the moment — I mean the kid’s great, he works hard, but it’s going to be hard to survive when a guy that you think is potentially your leading scorer goes two for 12 and one for seven overall.”

On the night, Meyer finished with 15 points on six of 18 shooting, Westry scored 14 on six of nine shooting and recorded a team-high five assists, and Salim London made a team-high two threes, scoring eight points. In the frontcourt, Rivera put up 12 points and seven rebounds while KyeRon Lindsay-Martin posted eight and six. Evan Chatman made one three and scored five points on two of six shooting.

The game mirrored the trajectory of the Vanderbilt exhibition: a competitive first half followed by an extended scoreless stretch that put the second half out of reach. According to Kennedy, the Blazers are still figuring out where to turn on offense when the shots aren’t falling.

“I think it was shotmaking on their part and the inability to do so on our part,” Kennedy said. “When you have empty stretches — and it’s been problematic for us, we played Vanderbilt in a exhibition game, we played Western Kentucky in an exhibition game, and now NC State — and we have these stretches where we’ll go three, four possessions: empty, empty, empty.”

UAB will have an opportunity to address these woes November 11th at home against Alabama State, but Friday night, Kennedy was left with no choice but to give props to Wade’s squad and move on.

“They booed me, but that’s what they should do to the opposing coach,” Kennedy said. “It’s been a long time, you know. I’ve got great memories from my time at N.C. State. For some reason, people think I don’t, but don’t believe in all the tabloid journalism, please. I’ve got great memories here. My wife is from Raleigh, and her family was here, and they’re all Wolfpack fans … I think Will brings the right energy at the right time to really ignite this place, and he’s done a great job with his roster construction.”

“Authority” has been the word of the early season for UAB.

During its exhibition losses to Vanderbilt and Western Kentucky, the Green and Gold didn’t play with enough of it. Against the Commodores, Andy Kennedy’s squad was severely outmuscled in the paint, leading the UAB coach to criticize the Blazers’ hustle. A week later, Kennedy watched his team again lose the physicality battle as it failed to overcome the Hilltoppers.

“There’s going to be bodies in your way,” he said. “You’ve got to be able to play through them in an effective manner. The best teams that I’ve ever had can do it at about at least a minimum of 55% rate. This team is under 50%, woefully.”

Monday night, UAB’s rate must have been over 70%. Although their opponent will go down as one of the weakest squads in the recent history of Division I basketball, the Blazers finally did what their coach expected of them, scoring 48 paint points to Mississippi Valley State’s 18, forcing 26 turnovers to the Delta Devils’ eight, and hauling in 49 rebounds to the visitors’ 34. Albeit against far stronger foes, UAB spent its previous two season openers shaking off rust. Not this time: the Blazers drilled MVSU for 1.25 points per possession while holding the Delta Devils to .65 PPP of their own.

Even Kennedy, for whom the matchup prompted a remarkable level of apprehension, was reassured by the Green and Gold’s performance, saying he was “really pleased with the way we approached the game.”

“I know Mississippi Valley had their struggles last year, but they only returned a couple of guys, you know, and I’ve seen our struggles,” Kennedy said. “So I just wanted us to play good.”

And play good they did. UAB started strong, riding steals and fast-break buckets to a 16-4 lead, but responses from Michael James and Tyrone Iroghama kept the visitors within striking distance; that was, until KyeRon Lindsay-Martin made the play of the game. As the Blazers broke the Delta Devils’ three-quarter-court press, Ari Gooch found the cutting forward on the baseline, who disregarded flagrant contact from Iroghama to throw down a highlight-reel slam.

“Oh my gosh, that boy just pushed right through him … ” Chance Westry said, recalling his reaction to the play. “It just gets us going, you know, seeing that impact. Like, ‘Dang, alright, bet, let’s all try,’ you know? ‘Let’s all try to push through and get to that rim.’”

In exchange for a hard-earned two points, Lindsay-Martin received a bloody nose and a technical foul, a trade he’d probably make again; sans the tech, Kennedy sure would. Although the UAB coach dinged the forward for missing a few bunnies in the second half, his dunk was emblematic of the effort the Blazers displayed throughout their wire-to-wire victory.

That effort started with the UAB backcourt. It’s no secret that the Blazers’ talented guard unit will likely determine whether the team contends for a conference title, and the group couldn’t have possibly gotten off to a better start. Jacob Meyer paced the Green and Gold with 16 first-half points, orchestrating a game-breaking 32-6 run that was sparked by Lindsay-Martin’s slam; Ahmad Robinson posted 14 points and seven assists; Westry led the Blazers in scoring, putting up 23 points in just 20 minutes. No member of the trio recorded a turnover.

Although Westry acknowledged UAB’s exhibition slate “didn’t go well,” he credited the Vanderbilt and Western Kentucky games with bringing the Blazers together, familiarizing the team’s many newcomers with each other’s playing styles. After the WKU loss, Kennedy complained that his squad wasn’t “good at anything” and didn’t “really have an identity”; Monday night, a more synchronized UAB team pushed back on its coach’s assertion.

“[The win] shows potential with the team,” Westry said. “I mean, we still got a lot to grow from. It shows a lot, you know. We had some big leads, some fast break points — we had 28 fast break points — so it shows that we can get out and run, and [48] points in the paint shows that we can play for force.”

The Blazers bullied the Delta Devils in transition, forcing 26 turnovers — their most in a single game since 2021 — that led to 40 UAB points. Supremely effective in space was Meyer, who topped the Green and Gold in fast break points with 12. Kennedy, a man who has described himself as pessimistic to a degree that is “not healthy,” found nits to pick with Meyer’s game, but he also lauded the guard’s quickness and straight-line speed.

“I think Jacob is our most aggressive scorer,” Kennedy said. “I think that’s pretty clear. I think he still leaves fruit on the vine, so to speak, and that he shoots with his right hand more than any left-hander I’ve ever seen in my life. Anybody got David Copperfield’s number? I wonder if he could maybe hypnotize him. Is Copperfield still doing his thing? This dude thinks he’s right-handed, but at our level, I think he’s going to really be dynamic. He can really get by. He’s explosive off that dribble.”

Overall, UAB dominated almost every statistical category. It held MVSU to an eye-watering eFG% of 33.6, turned the Delta Devils over on nearly 30% of their possessions, and pulled down offensive rebounds on 38.9% of missed shots compared to its opponent’s mark of 11.8%. The game was slightly more competitive in the second half as Kennedy emptied much of his bench in an effort to flesh out the Blazers’ rotations. Despite the constant substitutions, Kennedy felt as though his team remained focused for the majority of the game.

“Before viewing the tape, I thought in a 40 minute game, about 75% of the time we were pretty locked in,” Kennedy said. “When the score gets like this — and I guess it ends up over 50, that’s a big number — sometimes you’re going to have a little bit of a lapse in attention to detail, and I’m playing everybody. I tried to play everybody that I could play, and with that you’re going to disrupt your rhythm as well.”

The only aspect of UAB’s performance Kennedy blasted was its struggles from the free throw line: Westry went 4-8, Robinson went 2-4, Evan Chatman went 2-5, and Daniel Rivera went 0-2. The Blazers were inefficient from the charity stripe during the preseason, and that didn’t change last night.

“Chance has a monster game, and he misses four free throws as a guard,” Kennedy said. “It’s inexcusable. Evan Chatman’s too good of a shooter to be missing free throws like this. Daniel’s always struggled with it in his career, but he’s a guy that plays physical, and he’s going to draw contact. We need to make free throws at a much more efficient rate. We end up at 62% on the game, and that’s not to our standard.”

“We’ll continue to focus on it and continue to try to get the reps necessary to get these guys comfortable at the line.”

The Blazers’ next test — N.C. State on the road Friday — will be a little more complicated. NCSU is KenPom’s 31st-ranked team and just missed being included in the preseason AP Poll. Will Wade made his Wolfpack debut last night, leading his team to a 114-66 thrashing of overmatched N.C. Central in front of an announced crowd of 19,119 at Raleigh’s Lenovo Center; with a late-night tipoff of 8 PM CT, this weekend’s environment will likely be the most hostile UAB faces all year.

Kennedy is well-aware of the challenges Wade’s squad will pose — although the former McNeese State coach wasn’t on the sideline when the Cowboys crushed the Blazers 81-60 in 2023, serving a suspension stemming from violations he committed at LSU, he was the architect of the team that dealt UAB one of its worst home losses of the decade.

Nevertheless, Kennedy believes the early-season nature of the contest could give the Blazers a chance.

“We don’t have that much head-to-head experience, but I do know the way in which his teams play,” Kennedy said. “I’m sure he’s familiar with the way in which ours play. Both of us are kind of going at it with a limited knowledge base because we’re still trying to figure out our own teams. I know that we’re going to have to play really good to give ourselves a chance. They’re a team that’s predicted to do big things this year, and we look forward to the opportunity.”

To end his presser, Kennedy hit a familiar note.

“We’re going to have to play with a lot of authority.”

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At the dawn of every college basketball season, the Mississippi Valley State Delta Devils begin a brutal, cross-country road trip that takes them into the lairs of power conference foes and elite mid-majors alike.

Without fail, their non-conference strength of schedule ranks among the country’s top ten. The constants in these games: MVSU loses, and MVSU makes money. At one of the poorest athletic departments in the nation, this buy-game gauntlet keeps the lights on.

To quote a piece by The Athletic’s Sam Blum:

“[The Delta Devils] are the Washington Generals of college basketball, paid to lose spectacularly every time they take the court.”

MVSU hasn’t won a non-conference game on the road since November 22nd, 2006, a streak that doesn’t seem likely to end in 2025 — the Delta Devils’ schedule includes over 8,800 miles of travel and features matchups against Florida State, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Kansas State, among others.

Tonight, MVSU’s annual ritual begins as it travels to Bartow Arena for the christening of a new era in UAB basketball’s storied history. Nine times have the Delta Devils played against the Blazers; nine times have they lost by double-digits, including a 100-58 demolition spearheaded by Josh LeBlanc (!) in 2021.

Last season, MVSU went 3-28 and 1-17 in the SWAC, its only Division I win coming against Arkansas Pine Bluff, which KenPom pegged as America’s second-worst team. The Delta Devils, as you may have guessed, were KenPom’s worst team, posting an adjusted efficiency margin of -42.12 compared to UABP’s -25.94.

Only once in KenPom’s 28-year history — 2013 — has the gap between a season’s worst and second-worst teams been larger.

That year’s 0-28 Grambling State squad is the only team of the KenPom era to achieve a lower AdjEM (-46.26) than the 2024-2025 Delta Devils. Put simply: last year, MVSU fielded the second-worst team Division I basketball has seen since 1996-1997.

MVSU head coach George Ivory has lived this life for a long time. He starred for the Delta Devils as a player in the 80s, began his coaching career on the staff of the Jackson State women’s team in 1991, and returned to his alma mater as an assistant in 2002.

From there, Ivory bounced from SWAC sideline to SWAC sideline until he landed a job as the head coach at UAPB in 2008; he remained with the Golden Lions for 13 years. Ivory resigned after the 2021 campaign and took the reins of MVSU’s program the following spring. He’s about to enter his 38th year in the SWAC.

It remains to be seen whether Ivory can overcome immense budgetary restraints and lead the Delta Devils to their first March Madness berth since 2012. He’d probably settle for a winning record in SWAC play, something else MVSU hasn’t accomplished since 2012. In all likelihood, he’d be satisfied with six SWAC wins, a milestone MVSU hasn’t reached since 2017.

Our only concern, however, is what Ivory’s bunch will accomplish tonight. What should UAB expect to see from its first opponent of the post-Lendeborg era?

An Anemic Offense

MVSU has long struggled to shoot, but last season was the first time under Ivory the Delta Devils finished with the lowest effective field goal percentage (42.1%) in the country. They were incapable of making twos, threes, or free throws. Ugly.

Ivory’s squad also turned it over on nearly 25% of its possessions, and the Delta Devils’ strengths during the first two seasons of the coach’s tenure — offensive rebounding and foul-baiting — dissipated. MVSU sported a team-wide three-point percentage of 28.8%; as such, it attempted triples at one of the 20 lowest rates in the country. The Delta Devils also rarely got out in transition, so its offense was predicated on two-point attempts in the half-court.

The Delta Devils’ clunky roster construction — multiple guards that lived inside the arc, a non-shooting center in Alvin Stredic that posted up with great frequency — crowded the floor and made generating spacing and open shots difficult. As a result, many MVSU possessions ended in ISOs that were neither successful nor aesthetically pleasing: the Delta Devils recorded assists on 41.7% of their made field goals, the tenth-lowest rate in Division I.

MVSU’s strong suit, if it existed, was not passing or ballhandling. Save forward Jair Horton, no Delta Devil posted an assist-to-turnover ratio that ranked above the 18th percentile for their position. During MVSU’s 2024 non-conference gauntlet, several opponents found defensive success in being aggressive in the passing lanes and trapping on the baseline and sidelines.

The Delta Devils were also hamstrung by regular unforced turnovers.

As I alluded to earlier, MVSU once combatted its woes from the field by drawing fouls and creating second-chance opportunities; however, free throws and offensive rebounds were nowhere to be found last season. Stredic was the only player that consistently got to the line, but he posted pedestrian OREB numbers, and MVSU’s guards and wings were non-factors on the boards. Horton also provided little help. The Delta Devils boasted four players above 6’8”, but one — Walter Hamilton — was lost for the season after 11 games, and the others were too raw to see consistent playing time.

Thus, MVSU was out-offensive rebounded in all of its Division I games but three. The Delta Devils bulked up their frontcourt over the offseason, adding a slew of junior college bodies in the hopes that one of them will stick. We’ll see!

MVSU has made over nearly its entire roster, and some of the problems that plagued it in 2024-2025 could be slightly alleviated: last season, newcomers Michael James and Delkedric Holmes were both roughly 35% three-point shooters at the JUCO level.

Nevertheless, KenPom projects this unit, which features ten JUCO transfers, to once again be the nation’s worst. Even if MVSU becomes marginally more capable from the field, several structural problems remain in place. Sisk, the returning team leader in turnover rate (a whopping 34.1%), now becomes the presumed starting point guard. Uh oh!

UAB, which has been one of the best offensive rebounding programs in the country during Andy Kennedy’s tenure, is also insulated from losing games like this even if MVSU does go ballistic from beyond the arc. The Blazers are sans Lendeborg, yes, but KyeRon Lindsay-Martin should ensure UAB generates far more second-chance opportunities than do the Delta Devils.

A Porous Defense

While MVSU’s offense was just the 33rd-worst of the KenPom era, its defense was the second-worst of the KenPom era, beating out only 2018 USC Upstate. A telling statistic: the Delta Devils’ average defensive possession length of 16.4 seconds, the eighth-lowest mark in the country. This wasn’t a purposeful attempt to push the pace — remember, Ivory’s squad didn’t care to get out in transition — but rather a number that betrays the fact MVSU was simply unable to stop opposing offenses from doing as they pleased. The Delta Devils’ foes used an average of 16.4 seconds per possession because, more often than not, that’s all the time they needed to find a good look.

Whether it be in transition — which MVSU faced at a 98th percentile rate due to its tendency to miss shots and commit turnovers on the offensive end — or in the halfcourt, it didn’t take long for the Delta Devils’ opponents to put the ball in the basket.

Ivory’s squad couldn’t stop opponents from any region of the court, allowing them to hit threes, midrange jumpers, and shots at the rim — especially shots at the rim — at clips well above the DI average.

The point of defense is to make your opponents take bad shots, but MVSU had essentially no control over shot selection, its defense serving as a funnel to the paint. 37.4% of its opponents’ field goal attempts came at the rim (a really bad number), and they converted those attempts at a 68.4% rate (an even worse number). Just 9.4% of opposing shot attempts came from the midrange.

On the occasions the Delta Devils forced a miss, they gave up offensive rebounds 38% of the time; they also allowed .384 free throws per opposing field goal attempt, ranking 305th in the country in that category.

It was one of the worst units of all time, and it’s unlikely to get much better: KenPom again pegs the Delta Devils as the nation’s weakest defensive team by nearly three points per 100 possessions.

Outlook

Win by 40, get ready for NC State on Friday.

Prediction: UAB 82, MVSU 51

There will be no Cinderella stories told this year.

Michigan edged past KenPom darling UC San Diego, which was doomed by a slow start and a hostile whistle. Yale couldn’t keep up with Texas A&M on the boards. Grand Canyon was blown out of the water by Maryland, while Utah State met a similar fate against UCLA. High Point looked out of its league against Purdue. McNeese, one of a precious few underdogs to advance to the round of 32, was walloped by the same Boilermakers squad on Saturday morning. Drake ran into JT Toppin and Texas Tech.

This season’s round of 64 was one of the chalkiest in recent history. The highest-seeded mid-major teams still standing are #10 New Mexico and #12 Colorado State, the latter of which was outright favored against its first-round opponent.

The Lobos and the Rams are each roughly seven-point underdogs entering Sunday night. If both were to lose, the remaining field would consist solely of single-digit seeds sans #10 Arkansas.

This fact has been quickly seized upon by our nation’s most reactionary sports critics. Outkick’s Clay Travis confidently tweeted that “NIL has destroyed mid-majors in college basketball because all their talent gets scooped up by big money teams.” In an arbitrarily-capitalized YouTube title, Fox Sports’ Aaron Torres asked: “Have the best players TRANSFERRING - KILLED MARCH MADNESS UPSETS?”

A cursory Twitter search of “NIL” and “March Madness” reveals a similar sentiment common among fans.

Is that true? Are Travis, Torres, and the general public correct?

First of all, the indisputable — the gap between the 2025 tournament’s haves and have-nots is the widest in history. Will Warren of Stats By Will recently wrote a piece analyzing how this year’s field stacks up against fields of the past. Comparing teams using KenPom’s adjusted efficiency margin metric, his findings were stark:

The gap between 1 and 16 seeds is +42.86 AdjEM on average, the highest ever.

The gap between 2 and 15 seeds is +26.84 AdjEM on average, the second-highest ever.

The gap between 3 and 14 seeds is +20.96 AdjEM on average, the highest ever.

Lastly, the gap between 4 and 13 seeds is +16.48 AdjEM on average, which is not the highest ever. Just kidding: it’s the highest ever.

Long story short, the 2025 tournament’s elite teams are “superpowered,” in the words of Warren, while the 2025 tournament’s scrappy underdogs are about as weak as they’ve ever been. Who or what is to blame?

It’s hard to land on anything except NIL and the transfer portal. This season’s historically dominant batch of #1 seeds includes Auburn, which rosters Morehead State’s Johni Broome, Furman’s JP Pegues, and FIU’s Denver Jones, and Florida, which rosters Iona’s Walter Clayton, FAU’s Alijah Martin, Marshall’s Micah Handlogten, Belmont’s Will Richard, and Chattanooga’s Sam Alexis.

Duke has taken a different approach to team-building, using a titanic NIL budget to collect a mountain of blue-chip talent. Houston is unique in its bounty of veteran, home-grown contributors, but even the Cougars’ top two scorers are transfers.

Conversely, the top mid-major leagues suffered a collective down year after being stripped for parts last summer. The Mountain West, Atlantic 10, American, and Missouri Valley all saw significant drops in average AdjEM from 2024 to 2025. The former two had roughly a third of their players from last season transfer, while the latter two had roughly half of their players from last season transfer.

It’s safe to say that yes, this year’s NCAA Tournament field was dramatically imbalanced, and yes, NIL and the transfer portal played a significant role in that disparity. Auburn, Duke, Florida, and Houston (and Tennessee, and Alabama, and Texas Tech…) are among the strongest teams at their seedline in recent memory, while this year’s crop of mid-majors was simply not very deep. Outside of UCSD, McNeese, and Drake, there weren’t many underdogs with profiles that lent themselves to tournament success.

Is this what every year is going to look like? Does this mean the upset is dead?

To answer the second question first: of course not. This year’s tournament hasn’t been unprecedentedly chalky; it featured the fewest Round of 64 upsets since 2017, but commentators of the Travis/Torres ilk made similar complaints after that year’s tournament, and after 2015’s, and after 2019’s, and so on.

The upset will never be “dead” in a single-elimination tournament that consists of 40-minute games that can be swung by a couple three-pointers in either direction. Take last weekend: as Sports Illustrated’s Kevin Sweeney pointed out, the underdogs simply didn’t see their triples fall during the first round.

Despite going ice-cold from deep, Robert Morris, UCSD, and UNCW hung tight with their opponents. If all three of those teams made a few more shots, Torres would have posted a YouTube video entitled “Is this the GREATEST NCAA TOURNAMENT OF THE DECADE?”

Most of the cold-shooting 12-16 seeds that Sweeney references were capable from beyond the arc; nine of them ranked among the nation’s top-100 three-point shooting teams. However, only three of those nine made 30% or more of their triples during the first round. Instead of an existential crisis about the future of college basketball, could this year’s dearth of upsets be more appropriately attributed to unfavorable variance or the NCAA’s much-discussed overinflated Wilson ball?

The common and histrionic rebuttal to this point is that the athleticism gap between the haves and the have-nots has gotten so great that a team like UCSD, which made 36.1% of its triples on the year, shot 13 percentage points below its season average in its tournament game because it was overwhelmed by the size and length of Michigan.

I do not find this explanation particularly convincing. I will concede that Michigan’s three-point defense is better than that of, for example, Cal State Fullerton; however, the assertion that UCSD simply couldn’t get its shots off against the Wolverines isn’t supported by data. ShotQuality, a metric that takes into account the position of defenders, expected UCSD to score 16 more points against UM than it did based on the shots it took.

This holds true for multiple other underdogs, including Robert Morris. Although it is certainly possible that these teams were affected by the increased athleticism of their competition, they were also severely hampered by bad luck.

The point: yes, there were more bloodbaths than usual (Oregon-Liberty, Arizona-Akron, Maryland-Grand Canyon, Iowa State-Lipscomb, etc.). But even in a year where the gap between the haves and have-nots is the greatest it’s ever been, the tournament’s first round, though very chalky and generally unexciting, was a few favorable rolls away from being memorable. Drawing grand existential conclusions based on a weekend of miserable shooting luck is your prerogative, but I think it’s silly.

Now: will every year’s field look like this?

If someone were to propose the thesis that NIL and the transfer portal have permanently increased the talent differential between power conference teams and mid-major teams, I wouldn’t push back very hard. We are living in an era where the big dogs are as empowered as ever and the small fish are struggling to stay afloat. It could very well be the case that most tournament fields of the near future will be significantly less balanced than the fields we used to know.

However, there are many reasons to think that the 2025 tournament is imbalanced to a degree that won’t be replicated again. For one thing, the sheer number of elite teams included in this season’s field is unprecedented. With an AdjEM of +31.07, current KenPom #5 Tennessee would rank as KenPom’s top team of the 2022-2023 season. For another, the upcoming transfer class will be greatly diminished as college basketball’s COVID-year elders become all but extinct. The portal will never again be as bountiful as it was in years past.

There’s also the looming House settlement, which will rework NIL deals, allow schools to share media-rights revenue with athletes, and force schools with football programs to make potentially difficult decisions surrounding the allocation of money. Any currently relevant analysis of the effect NIL and the portal have had on March Madness will have to be reevaluated over the coming years.

Taking all of the above into consideration — there are major challenges facing mid-major basketball programs, but it is senseless to declare the NCAA tournament upset dead based on two days of play.

Game Information

UAB (8-7, KenPom #124) vs. Tulane (8-7, KenPom #168)

📅 Tuesday, January 7th, 2025

🕒 6:30 PM CST

🏟️ Birmingham, Alabama — Bartow Arena

📺 ESPN+ — Will Kollmeyer and Mo Finley

📻 WJQX 100.5 FM — David Crane and Steve Mitchell

Tonight marks the 1,500th game in UAB men’s basketball history, a milestone you can read more about here.

Trends and Odds

UAB enters the afternoon at 8-7 (1-1). The Blazers absolutely dominated Tulsa on Saturday to claim their first conference win of the season, holding the Golden Hurricane to a grotesque 0.71 points per possession. Andy Kennedy described the effort as “by far our best defensive performance of the year.”

The UAB coach had high praise for Alejandro Vasquez, who led all scorers with an efficient 27. The senior wing has now scored 15 or more points in three consecutive games for the first time since March 2024.

The Blazers have moved up 14 KenPom spots since the beginning of conference play; their #124 ranking places them sixth among American teams, and they’re gaining on #120 Temple.

Tulane enters the afternoon at 8-7 (2-0). In a late-December post that wasn’t published, I wrote:

Barring a miraculous turnaround, the Ron Hunter era is on its last legs in New Orleans. During his six-season tenure, Hunter has traditionally made up for mediocre-to-poor records with respectable KenPom rankings; unfortunately for him, Tulane is currently lacking both wins and analytic clout for the first time since the pandemic. The Green Wave have a thoroughly unimpressive resume, having beaten two non-D1 teams and having lost to a terrible New Orleans squad. They are almost unanimously a bottom-four team in the conference.

Through their first two games of league play, Tulane has smashed Charlotte and UTSA by a combined margin of 44, looking like an entirely new team in the process. Although their non-conference resume remains concerningly bad, it’s impossible to dismiss the Green Wave after the events of the last week — they’ve climbed from 205th in KenPom to 168th.

Neither UAB nor Tulane has beaten a KenPom top 200 team this season. Something has to give.

Barttorvik and KenPom each give the Blazers a 72% probability of beating Tulane and predict a final score of UAB 81, TU 75.

Series History

UAB holds a 26-13 all-time record against Tulane and has dominated the series in recent decades. The Wave has only beaten the Blazers twice since 2005.

The first meeting between UAB and Tulane remains one of the teams’ most compelling. The date was December 15th, 1992, and the Blazers were discontented. Now on the wrong side of Bartow’s halcyon days, it had been years since the program received significant national exposure.

“I haven’t beaten a ranked team since DePaul my freshman year,” UAB guard Stanley Jackson told the Birmingham Post-Herald.

18th-ranked Tulane, coming off its first-ever NCAA Tournament appearance, offered UAB water in the midst of the Blazers’ relevance drought. The Green Wave played an exciting, up-tempo style of basketball, hockey-style substituting its entire bench unit — a group known as “the Posse” — into the game with the intent to overwhelm the opponent. An ESPN crew descended on Birmingham to watch the Blazers take on coach Perry Clark’s squad.

In front of a raucous UAB Arena crowd of over 6,500, UAB and Tulane battled back and forth. Neither team claimed a significant advantage for the game’s first 30 minutes. It seemed as though the Blazers had seized control when they took a five-point lead with fewer than nine minutes on the clock, but the Green Wave’s pressure defense subsequently forced six consecutive UAB turnovers. Tulane soon roared back into the lead.

Led by guards Stanley Jackson and Carter Long, the Green and Gold responded with a game-ending 17-9 run, turning their opponents’ aggression against them.

“With the way they’re running and jumping on defense, there’s got to be a gap somewhere,” said Long. “They left open some three-pointers and we took advantage.”

Long nailed several long triples, the Blazers made 17 of their 21 second-half free throws, and the home team escaped by a score of 75-69, finally claiming its long-awaited ranked victory.

The two programs would see much more of each other after they became founding members of Conference USA in 1995. For the rest of the decade, UAB and Tulane waged a highly-competitive rivalry — at the turn of the millennium, the series score was 7-6 in favor of the Blazers. The balance of power would subsequently shift in the Green Wave’s favor, as they won 7 of the teams’ first 11 meetings of the 2000s. In 2005, UAB suffered a heartbreaking road overtime loss in which New Orleans native Squeaky Johnson missed two potential buzzer-beaters.

But the Blazers went on to crush Tulane in Birmingham just over a month later, a victory that catalyzed a still-active streak of comical dominance. Since February 26th, 2005, UAB has beaten the Green Wave 15 times in 17 tries; Tulane’s lone victories came against the 15-16 2007 team and the 18-13 2014 team.

Although Ron Hunter’s squad let one get away from them in Bartow last season, they made an concerted effort to score their first home win against UAB since the Squeaky game. However, excellent late-game free throw shooting by the Green and Gold repulsed an attempted Green Wave comeback and locked down a 78-67 Blazer victory.

Tulane Scouting Report

Ron Hunter has made a career out of revitalizing traditionally downtrodden programs. He got his first head coaching job at IUPUI, where he would oversee the team’s 1998 transition from Division II to Division 1. By 2004, Hunter had led the Jaguars to their first and only NCAA Tournament appearance. By 2008, he had snuck IUPUI — IUPUI! — into the KenPom top 70.

In 2011, Hunter headed south for Georgia State, historically one of the least successful D1 programs of all time. Nevertheless, he worked his magic and inspired another team to rise above its station: GSU won six conference titles, appeared in three NCAA Tournaments, scored a legendary March Madness upset over Baylor, and produced a first-round NBA Draft pick during Hunter’s eight-year tenure.

Following a murky 2019 contract dispute, the coach left Atlanta behind for Tulane, yet another success-deprived afterthought. In the 16 seasons leading up to Hunter’s arrival, the Green Wave posted a total of four winning records. Needless to say, they hadn’t sniffed the NCAA Tournament since Perry Clark’s aforementioned tenure.

In the vein of Tulsa’s 2022 hiring of Eric Konkol, which we discussed over the weekend, Tulane’s 2019 hiring of Hunter was considered a coup by many, but both coaches have since seen their shares of highs and lows.

Hunter hasn’t found the same success in New Orleans as he did at IUPUI or Georgia State, as he’s finished above the .500 mark just once. His saving grace has been the respect afforded to him by various algorithms. As I previously wrote: “During his six-season tenure, Hunter has traditionally made up for mediocre-to-poor records with respectable KenPom rankings.” The analytics would have you believe that the 14-15 2022 squad was the best team Tulane has fielded since Clark roamed the sidelines.

With last year’s roster decimated by graduation and the transfer portal, the Green Wave have ridden a cast of new characters to yet another uninspiring record; this time, they don’t have the KenPom rating to back it up. Although Tulane has surged since the start of conference play and will certainly present the Blazers with a challenge, Hunter is likely coaching for his job.

Almost any player you remember from last year’s Green Wave squad is gone. Kevin Cross? Jaylen Forbes? Collin Holloway? Sion James? Kolby King? One way or another, they all departed New Orleans over the summer.

Georgetown transfer Rowan Brumbaugh is Tulane’s new point guard. The former Texas Longhorn was a top-100 recruit coming out of high school in 2022, but he never saw the court in Austin. He spent last season playing a contributing role in the Hoya backcourt, averaging 8.3 points per game on 22.1 minutes per game while displaying flashes of excellence. Now in New Orleans, Brumbaugh has become Ron Hunter’s single most-used player, on the floor almost 80% of the time.

Brumbaugh is a capable distributor, initiating many of Tulane’s actions and sporting a top-90 assist rate in the country. Although not a particularly intimidating three-point shooter, he possesses the range to keep the defense honest — Hunter isn’t afraid to let him take a mid-range jumper — and is a good attacker and finisher, currently making dunks and layups at a 66.7% clip. All of these traits combined with his passable defense makes Brumbaugh a staple of the Green Wave’s rotation.

Returner Asher Woods, who averaged just 6.3 minutes per game last season, has enjoyed a campaign filled with playing time. He typically shares the backcourt with Brumbaugh, playing a complimentary role on offense. Although his assist rate is respectable, Woods is not much of a shot creator and is a below-average shooter at all three levels. Currently hitting three-pointers at a 28% clip and two-pointers at a 46% clip, Woods is the team’s least efficient player by eFG%.

Freshman wing Kam Williams is the only Tulane player to see the court more than Brumbaugh, and for good reason — last month, ESPN rated him among the ten best mid-major freshman in the country. The 6’8” former four-star prospect is obscenely efficient on the offensive end, attempting almost exclusively dunks and triples while making both shot types at an 80th percentile rate. He hasn’t created many of his own shots, but he hasn’t needed to: Tulane’s drive-and-kick offense generates Williams plenty of looks from above the break, most of which are assisted by Brumbaugh.

Williams also sports steal and block percentages north of 3.7% and turns the ball over at just an 8.5% rate. Yesterday, he was named the AAC’s Freshman of the Week after averaging 12 points and 6 rebounds in the Green Wave’s demolitions of Charlotte and UTSA.

Although he saw more consistent playing time earlier in the year, freshman guard Mari Jordan primarily serves as the backup to Woods and Williams. Jordan, a four-star recruit coming out of high school in 2023, spent last season with the Georgia Bulldogs but redshirted to preserve his eligibility, never appearing in a game. Jordan has struggled to find an offensive niche other than low-volume three-point shooter; he also comes in as Tulane’s third-least productive defender by EvanMiya’s BPM.

The Green Wave frontcourt is manned by forward Kaleb Banks and center Gregg Glenn, arguably Tulane’s best players. Banks has been a weapon on offense this season, averaging 18.1 points per game and grading out as the conference's top player by hoop-math’s offensive RAPM. The former Indiana transfer, who was horrid over two years under Mike Woodson, has revitalized himself in New Orleans, making his two-pointers at a 64% rate and nailing triples at a 36% rate — on decent volume! Banks also gets to the line with ease, almost never turns the ball over, and boasts one of the highest block rates in the conference.

Hunter recently described Glenn as a “Kevin Cross 2.0” who “we can run our offense through,” an assertion back up by his sky-high assist rate. The 6’7” junior doesn’t possess the frame of a typical center — Tulane doesn’t field a “typical center” — and is a dangerous passer, although he’s not that adept at creating offense for himself. Glenn is also as productive a per-minute rebounder as Banks and stands as one of the conference’s better defenders.

The lineup of Brumbaugh, Woods, Williams, Banks, and Glenn is what we’ll see a lot of today, as that group has been on the floor for nearly 30% of the Green Wave’s last five games.

Outlook

Ron Hunter has played a version of the same matchup zone defense since he was hired at IUPUI in 1994. Also known as an “amoeba zone,” Hunter’s complex system combines elements of man-to-man and zone defenses, adding a wrinkle to opponents’ game preparation. Andy Kennedy referenced the matchup zone in Saturday’s postgame interview, saying:

But very seldom do you get Saturday games, and Saturday-Tuesday is a quick turn against a team in Tulane that plays later this afternoon at home against UTSA. They play an unorthodox style with that matchup zone for 40 minutes that Ron Hunter's famous for.

On short rest against a team notoriously tough to prepare for, how effectively will UAB be able to score? They averaged 1.10 points per possession against the Green Wave in 2024, but that was against a TU frontline much less capable of rebounding than it is today. One thing is for certain: the Blazers will have to make open looks, something they’ve struggled with all season. Owing to the nature of Hunter’s defense, Tulane allows its opponents to take more three-pointers than any other team in the American.

When the ball is tipped on Tuesday night in Bartow Arena, the UAB men’s basketball team will have officially begun its 1,500th game. Gene Bartow’s upstart Blazers aren’t such upstarts anymore. They celebrated their 500th game in 1994; their 1,000th in 2010. Now older than 55% of Division 1 programs, UAB is used to occasions like these.

Still, 1,500 is a milestone among milestones. It will be the first time the Green and Gold have played a game of such historical significance in Birmingham; it will be the third such game played against Tulane; if all goes according to plan, it will boost the Blazers’ record in cornerstone games to 4-2.

As Andy Kennedy and company prepare for tomorrow night’s showdown, let’s examine some of the steps along the path that led us to this moment, moving along by increments of 250. The games will provide looks into five distinct eras of Blazer history — the early Gene Bartow years, the late Gene Bartow years, the Murry Bartow years, the Mike Davis years, and the Rob Ehsan years.

Game 250 — 70-54 win at Charlotte, 2/17/86

UAB was the Sun Belt’s unquestioned top dog during the first half of the 1980s. The Blazers appeared in five consecutive conference title games, won three consecutive conference championships, and enjoyed deep runs into the NCAA Tournament’s Rounds of 16 and 8. Although the Green and Gold struggled through a frustrating 1985-1986 season marred by incidents of bad fan behavior at Western Kentucky and Old Dominion, the program was still seen as the class of the SBC at the time of the its 250th game. Just weeks earlier, WKU had taken down UAB in a program-defining victory, a game which you can read more about here.

A abysmal Charlotte team (7-17, 1-11) was hoping to revitalize its season by pulling off a similar upset over the visiting Blazers. The invigorated 49ers put on one of their best performances of the year, holding close to their superior opponents until the three-minute mark of the second half; it was then UNCC coach Jeff Mullins decided to go into a 2-3 zone, allowing UAB guard Michael Charles to fire at will.

Charles, pictured above, swished three consecutive baseline jumpers to propel his team to a 70-54 win.

“We didn’t think he could hit three in a row, to be honest,” a disheartened Mullins said after the game.

Charles finished with 12 points. Jerome Mincy put up 17 points and 11 rebounds, James Ponder contributed 14 points, and Steve Mitchell contributed 10.

Game 500 — 78-73 win at DePaul, 2/9/94

In 1991, UAB left the Sun Belt in favor of the Great Midwest Conference, a league comprised of Cincinnati, Memphis, Marquette, DePaul, and Saint Louis. The Blazers were no longer the biggest fish in the pond: as the 1993 season began, Gene Bartow and crew had yet to post a GMWC winning percentage above .500. The Green and Gold made just one NCAA Tournament from 1987 to 1993, setting an ignominious school record.

The ‘93-’94 campaign brought change. UAB coasted to one of the best starts in program history, winning 17 of its first 20 games and eventually sliding into the March Madness field. Further frustrations were on the horizon — Bartow would retire in 1996, one year after he put up the only losing record of his UAB career — but at the time of the Blazers’ 500th game, all of the pressure was on their opponents.

While the Green and Gold were essentially guaranteed an NCAA bid at 17-3, DePaul entered the evening of February 9th, 1994 in desperate need of a victory. The Blue Demons were 2-5 in conference play, prompting head coach Joey Meyer to resort to begging.

“I would like to get a win in this league — will someone give us a win?” Meyer was quoted as saying in the Northwest Herald.

UAB used a massive first-half run to grab a 37-29 halftime lead, which the Blazers didn’t relinquish until DePaul forward Tom Kleinschmidt tied the game with 1:15 left. Robert Shannon immediately responded with a baseline jumper, and Clarence Thrash swatted Kleinschmidt’s last-second layup attempt, denying Meyer’s plea. Shannon scored 22, Carter Long scored 17, and Reginald Allen scored 14.

The victory came in spite of the efforts of Kleinschmidt, who finished the night with a career-high 37 points.

“We had five people try to guard him. I thought Murry was going to get in there and try to guard him after a while,” Bartow joked. “He had a phenomenal game.”

Game 750 — 83-72 loss at Tulane, 2/16/02

Murry Bartow took over for his father in 1996, leading the Blazers to one NCAA Tournament and two 20-win seasons over six years. By the waning days of the 2002 campaign, the younger Bartow’s tenure had all but run its course, with his squad mired at 13-17 — to this day the worst record in program history. The Blazers performed so poorly during a three-game losing streak in February that Bartow sealed off the players’ dressing room with tape.

One of the losses came in the program’s 750th game, when the Green and Gold went on the road to take on equally-struggling Tulane. UAB stars Mo Finley and Will Campbell had both suffered injuries the previous week; the former hurt himself diving after a loose ball and the latter sprained his ankle. Finley managed to perform admirably against the Green Wave, but the big man Campbell was limited — Bartow described him as moving at “60 percent speed.” UAB lost 83-72 after giving up an 18-1 run midway through the game.

Bartow resigned fewer than four weeks later.

Game 1,000 — 58-49 win at Tulane, 1/9/10

The program’s 1,000th game came under much brighter circumstances. Now led by fourth-year head coach Mike Davis, the Blazers were off to their best start since the aforementioned 1993-1994 season, entering the new year with a sparkling 11-2 record. After further padding their already-impressive resume with wins over Arkansas and East Carolina, UAB headed to New Orleans as significant favorites.

Once again facing off against Tulane, the Blazers put on a grotesque offensive display, making 41.2% of their field goals while turning the ball over 18 times. UAB recorded just 9 assists on the night, a statistic that infuriated Davis.

“We’re not sharing the ball at all,” Davis said. “We got guys open and they don’t get the ball. Everybody just wants to take a turn shooting the ball. We’ve just got to clean that up.”

The Green and Gold’s only saving grace was Tulane’s equally eye-watering statline: 36.2% shooting, 17 turnovers, and 3 assists. A scowling Davis walked off the Fogelman Arena court in clear disgust, but UAB improved to 14-2. Howard Crawford and Elijah Millsap were the lone Blazers to score double-digit points.

Although the 2009-2010 campaign would ultimately fall short of expectations — two heartbreaking late-season losses to Memphis and UTEP denied UAB an NCAA Tournament bid — the program’s 1,000th game coincided with perhaps the highest point of the Davis era.

Game 1,250 — 63-50 loss, Richmond, 11/20/17

UAB’s most recent milestone game was played just a year after Rob Ehsan became the sixth coach in program history. The Blazers were coming off a vastly disappointing 2016-2017 campaign that saw the team drop from 89th in KenPom to 196th; Nick Norton’s season-opening ACL tear doomed them from the start.

Although the Green and Gold scored two promising blowouts to begin the 2017 season, the opening game of the Cayman Island Classic brought them back to earth. A bad Richmond team that would only post two other non-conference wins jumped on UAB early and never relinquished their lead. The Blazers clawed within six in the second half, but a late Spider run buried Ehsan’s squad. It was a coming-out party for UR freshman Grant Golden, who racked up 26 points on the afternoon.

Only Zack Bryant and William Lee scored double-digit points for the Blazers, who shot 17.3% from beyond the arc and turned the ball over 16 times.

“Offensively, we just really struggled tonight… I thought [holding Richmond to] 63 points, we should have had a different result," Ehsan said. "If you would have told me they would have scored 63, I thought we'd be in good shape."

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The UAB men’s basketball team smothered Tulsa on Saturday afternoon, turning in its best all-around effort of the season en route to a dominant 83-51 victory. Ja’Borri McGhee scored 8 points in the game’s first 5 minutes, Christian Coleman racked up 14 points and 13 rebounds, and Alejandro Vasquez paced all scorers with a season-high 27 points, connecting on 4 of his 9 three-point attempts. UAB improved to 8-7 (1-1) and moved from 134th in KenPom to 123rd.

Eric Konkol and crew couldn’t buy a bucket. After sticking with the Blazers until the U16 media timeout, the Golden Hurricane went stone-cold from the field; UAB used separate 14-2 and 13-0 runs to blow the game open by the 10-minute mark. Tulsa didn’t make a field goal for the final 6 minutes of the opening period, only scoring when a last-second Bradley Ezewiro foul gifted TU’s Dwon Odom three free throws. The halftime score was 44-22 in favor of the Blazers.

Whatever Konkol told his squad in the locker room didn’t work. UAB opened the second half with another 14-2 spurt, as the combined efforts of the three-headed monster of Vasquez, Coleman, and McGhee ballooned the Blazers’ lead to over 30 points by the U16 media timeout.

Although Tulsa tried everything to claw back in the game, giving reserves Jesaiah McWright and Jaye Nash significant minutes in the faint hope of finding a spark, the Green and Gold did not budge, marking a welcome departure from Tuesday’s loss to North Texas. Makhi Myles, Will Shaver, Marquis Hargrove, and Ryan Donohoo comfortably entered the game with 2 minutes remaining.

Yaxel Lendeborg failed to score double-digit points for only the third time this season, while Butta Johnson, Tony Toney, and Tyren Moore had quiet statistical days.

Alejandro Vasquez Breaks Out

It’s been a bit of a frustrating season for Alejandro Vasquez, whom multiple prognosticators selected to their preseason all-conference teams last offseason. Although AJ has been among the Blazers’ most productive players by Evan Miyakawa’s BPR, he simply hasn’t seen his three-pointer fall — a rough late-November to mid-December stretch saw him miss 19 of 24 triples.

That wasn’t the case on Saturday. Vasquez turned in a performance reminiscent of his dominant AAC title game against Temple, making 4 of 9 threes, getting to the rim at will, and almost single-handedly carrying UAB’s scoring burden during some stretches. The senior wing has now scored 15 or more points in three consecutive games for the first time since March 2024.

Andy Kennedy was thrilled by Vasquez’s display of form, saying:

I thought we were really engaged defensively in the first half, and then AJ got going. Man, is it good to see him make some shots? Because I think it just relieves some pressure. I thought Ja'Borri did a good job of setting the tone of us driving the basketball early. And then AJ settled in. I think he had 14 in the first half, 13 in the second half for 27…

It's just now about consistency. The mind is a powerful thing. He played good against North Texas. He played good tonight. Hopefully, that's the catalyst that he needs to exhale and really, really give us some leadership from that wing position on the perimeter.

Vasquez himself was equally satisfied with his performance:

It felt great, man. Seeing that thing go in felt good… It just fires me up. I just want to shoot more and more as I see it go in… I feel like I was in a slump. I kind of got out of my slump. Took me a little while, but I definitely feel confident now that I'm playing [well].

Defensive Excellence

Entering Saturday afternoon, UAB sat at nearly 300th in KenPom’s defensive rankings, a number that would be far and away the worst in program history if it held. Perhaps the most egregious example of the Blazers’ porousness came on Tuesday in Denton: the Green and Gold allowed UNT to post an offensive rating of 168.7 in the second half, blowing what was once an 18-point lead.

Although Tulsa is by no means an offensive juggernaut, it was encouraging to see the Blazers hold the visitors to a measly 0.71 points per possession and move up nearly 40 spots in KenPom’s defensive rankings. Most notably, UAB harassed Tulsa’s Keaston Willis for 40 minutes, barely allowing the Golden Hurricane sniper to get a shot off. Averaging 13.1 points and 7.1 3PA per game, Willis finished the afternoon with 4 points on 0-3 three-point shooting.

Kennedy was deeply pleased with his team’s defensive performance, saying:

Keaston Willis is a really good player. I think if we all had to pick somebody from our league that you would want to represent you in a game of HORSE, he might be my number one pick. I think he is a dead-eye shooter. So we just tried to make sure that we didn't let him get comfortable with his touches, and our guys did a great job. I thought we lost him one time, and he just didn't have any rhythm, and he missed it. So we were fortunate that it wasn't his night, and I thought our guys did a really good job…

[This was] by far our best defensive performance of the year. Now that ceiling was pretty low, obviously, but [it was] by far our best 40 minutes.

Kennedy specifically praised Tony Toney when discussing the team’s overall defensive effort — the guard racked up 7 points, 4 assists, 3 rebounds, a steal, and a breakaway dunk.

“I thought Tony was tremendous defensively,” he said. “[He] made some real plays in the open floor.”

The Blazers also:

• Held Tyshawn Archie, Tulsa’s lead guard, to 0 points on 9 shots.

• Held guard Dwon Odom, by far Tulsa’s most efficient offensive player, to 9 points and 5 turnovers.

• Held guard Jaye Nash, last week’s AAC Freshman of the Week, to 5 points on 1-9 shooting.

• Held forward Justin Amadi, Tulsa’s most efficient foul-drawer, to 0 free-throw attempts.

• Held Tulsa’s reserves to 6-23 combined shooting.

Almost nothing the Golden Hurricane tried on offense was effective. The below chart from hoop-explorer breaks down TU’s play type efficiency, with green corresponding to success and red corresponding to failure.

Odom and Archie, who typically score 0.86 points per play on rim attacks, were held to just 0.39 points per play on rim attacks; although both guards are more than capable of getting downhill, neither found any success on the interior, a testament to the Blazer defense. Nash was also an offensive non-factor, missing all 7 of his two-point attempts. The Golden Hurricane were forced to get out of their comfort zone and lean on their frontcourt. Freshman center Ian Smikle put up 17 points on 80% shooting, but the remainder of Tulsa’s big men — whose limitations I mentioned in the preview — scored a total of 6 points.

Greg Gordon’s Departure

Early yesterday afternoon, Steve Irvine reported that UAB wing Greg Gordon, who hadn’t seen the court since December 5th, has left the team for personal reasons. Gordon was spotted watching a basketball game at Iona College — his former school — on Friday night. Although Gordon was a highly-touted offseason transfer acquisition, he never gelled into UAB’s rotation, averaging just 13 minutes and 3.1 points per game in 7 appearances. He missed UAB’s Virgin Islands trip with visa issues; his December absences were chalked up to the flu.

“Ultimately, he made a decision that he wanted to leave the team for an extended period of time,” Kennedy said. “We wish him nothing but the best.”

Following James White’s December 2023 departure, this is the second consecutive year in which a UAB player has left the team in the middle of the season.

What’s Next?

The Blazers return to Bartow on Tuesday, January 7th, to take on the Tulane Green Wave. As Kennedy said:

Very seldom in this league do you play Saturday games. And I don't know if we've ever played a Saturday-Tuesday turn...

But very seldom do you get Saturday games, and Saturday-Tuesday is a quick turn against a team in Tulane that plays later this afternoon at home against UTSA. They play an unorthodox style with that matchup zone for 40 minutes that Ron Hunter's famous for. So we'll take this. We'll get back to work tomorrow.

Tulane ended up beating UTSA by nearly 30 points; it marked their second consecutive dominant conference win, as they beat Charlotte by 15 on the road last week. Ron Hunter’s squad struggled mightily during non-conference play, at one point losing five games in a row and dropping to 232nd in KenPom, but the Green Wave are undefeated since December 14th and are 2-0 in the league.

Tulane is now 169th in KenPom. They will present a challenging puzzle for the Blazers to solve on short rest.

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UAB (7-7, KenPom #134) vs. Tulsa (6-8, KenPom #264)

📅: Saturday, January 4th, 2025

🕒: 1:00 PM CST

🏟️: Birmingham, Alabama — Bartow Arena

📺: ESPN+

📻: WJQX 100.5 FM

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Trends and Odds

UAB enters the afternoon at 7-7 (0-1) overall, having suffered one of its most improbable losses of the Kennedy era on Tuesday. The Blazers allowed a North Texas team that plays at the seventh-slowest pace in the country to erase an 18-point deficit in fewer than 14 minutes. UNT’s Atin Wright missed what would’ve been a game-winning runner against the Blazers when he was at Drake last season; this time, he drained an improbable buzzer-beating three-pointer to send the Green and Gold home empty-handed.

The Blazers have now blown four leads of 18 or more points over the last calendar year: Tuesday at North Texas, December 15th vs. Arkansas State, March 3rd at Memphis, and January 23rd at Charlotte. UAB’s current run of bad fortune stands alone among D1 basketball teams.

Only 11 men’s teams have blown multiple leads of 18+ points since January 1st, 2024, and none have done it more times than the Blazers.

Despite losing to UNT, the Blazers have moved up six KenPom spots from the beginning of the week; however, their #134 ranking still places them sixth among American teams.

Tulsa enters the afternoon at 6-8 overall, with all of their wins having come against either non-D1 teams or teams sub-300 in KenPom. Eric Konkol’s squad dropped its conference opener to Rice on Wednesday and has lost eight of its last 11. The Golden Hurricane rank 264th in KenPom, good for the worst mark in the AAC by a long shot.

UAB is 6-1 against teams 200th or worse in KenPom; in fact, all of the Blazers’ D1 wins have come against such opponents. Tulsa, on the other hand, is 0-3 against teams in the KenPom top 150. They’ve suffered blowout losses to Oklahoma State, Loyola Chicago, and UCF.

FanDuel gives the Blazers a 90.48% implied probability of beating Tulsa and has set the spread at UAB -12.5, while KenPom gives the Blazers an 84% probability of beating Tulsa and predicts a final score of UAB 85, TU 74.

Series History

UAB holds a 10-7 all-time record against Tulsa, although the Blazers have dominated the series since 2012. Tulsa has never won in Birmingham.

UAB first met Tulsa in 1990 in the first round of the All-College Basketball Classic, an annual holiday tournament hosted in Oklahoma City. At the time, the Golden Hurricane were led by J.D. Barnett, with whom the Blazers were intimately familiar from his six-year stint at VCU. Barnett was legendary for his intensity, throwing up before games and punching holes in blackboards at halftime; he would prove as fiery as ever on this day. A technical foul received by the wildly gesticulating Tulsa coach propelled UAB to a 10-point second half lead.

To Gene Bartow’s fury, the Green and Gold proceeded to waste the game away, missing 11 crucial free throws attempts down the stretch. UAB finished the night just 26 of 41 from the charity stripe. Despite a 27-point effort from Andy Kennedy, the Blazers suffered a 92-86 loss.

“This team has got some incredible, incredible problems trying to win games at the end,” said Bartow. “Missing free throws in key spots, turning the ball over… This team is going to be tough to deal with.”

UAB and Tulsa would meet a few more times throughout the decade, with the Golden Hurricane taking three of five games from the Blazers. The juggernaut Bill Self-coached 1999 TU squad handed UAB an 88-73 loss.

The parity would continue when the programs became conference rivals in 2006. The Blazers won the teams’ first three Conference USA matchups; the Golden Hurricane took the next three. All of Tulsa’s wins during this stretch were soul-crushers, as TU eliminated UAB from the 2008 and 2009 C-USA tournaments and won the teams’ January 2009 meeting on a buzzer-beater.

The tide finally began to turn in 2010, when a 16-3 Tulsa team crowned by some as the successor to Calipari’s Memphis visited Birmingham. In front of a rowdy Bartow Arena crowd, the 25th-ranked Blazers took home a thriller over the Golden Hurricane, holding TU star Justin Hurtt to just two points.

Tulsa beat UAB a year later, but that game marks their most recent victory over the Blazers — since 2012, the Green and Gold are 4-0 against TU. Bizarrely, each of the teams’ three most recent meetings has been decided by a final score of 70-63.

PJ Haggerty and company gave UAB a scare last season, staying within striking distance as late as the U4 media timeout, but sloppy Golden Hurricane offense and superb Blazer free throw shooting down the stretch secured Andy Kennedy’s squad the victory.

Tulsa Scouting Report

Three years ago, Eric Konkol left behind the Louisiana Tech winning machine and headed west, returning to the program at which he began his coaching career in 2000. The rationale for the move is still not entirely clear — over seven seasons in Ruston, Konkol led his team to five top-three conference finishes while never posting a losing record — but his hiring was widely seen as a coup for Tulsa, a once-proud program that had fallen dormant under then-head coach Frank Haith.

Things didn’t quite go as planned in Konkol’s inaugural 2022-2023 campaign. The Golden Hurricane were an absolute disaster, finishing the year with an abysmal record of 5-25 and winning just a single American game. It was undoubtedly Tulsa’s worst team of the KenPom era (1996-present) and perhaps the worst team in program history.

During the following season, Tulsa jumped from 316th in KenPom to 184th thanks to an influx of new players. Former Louisiana Tech Bulldog Cobe Williams, former Charlotte 49er Jared Garcia, former Michigan Wolverine Isaiah Barnes, JUCO transfer Carlous Williams, freshman Tyshawn Archie, and freshman Matt Reed all contributed to the Golden Hurricane’s renaissance, but TCU import PJ Haggerty took the cake. He was unanimously named the AAC’s Freshman of the Year after averaging 21.2 points, 5.5 rebounds, 3.8 assists, and 1.9 steals per game.

Many of those players are gone — Haggerty and both Williamses moved on over the offseason. Nevertheless, many prognosticators thought Eric Konkol’s 2024-2025 squad had the potential to build on the promise of last year and finally finish in the upper half of the AAC.

That breakthrough is nowhere to be found. Tulsa’s campaign has been nothing short of disastrous: after a 3-0 start, they’ve won two of their last seven games. The Golden Hurricane has dropped 103 spots in KenPom since the season began, the fifth-most of any Division 1 team. Despite facing one of the nation’s weakest non-conference schedules — one that rivals even UAB’s in softness — Tulsa has strung together just four D1 wins, losing to a SWAC team and a moribund Georgia State in the process.

The Golden Hurricane’s backcourt is primarily manned by guards Tyshawn Archie and Dwon Odom. The returner Archie, a 2024 AAC All-Freshman Team selection, honed his craft while playing backup to Cobe Williams last season. The newcomer Odom spent the 2023-2024 campaign at Georgia State.

Archie is a quick, twitchy distributor who is also capable of applying disruptive ball pressure and pushing the pace in transition, but according to hoop-math, he’s been among the least efficient scoring ballhandlers in the AAC this season. Archie attempts nearly as many field goals per game as Haggerty did last year, with 75% of his shots coming either at the rim or from beyond the three-point line, but he makes a middling 59.4% of his dunks/layups and hits triples at an underwhelming 27.8% clip.

A consensus top-60 recruit in 2020, Odom was a member of a highly-touted class of Atlanta-area high school guards that included Eric Gaines; like Gaines, Odom originally signed with a high-major program, spending the opening stanza of his career at Xavier. He transferred back home to Georgia State in 2022, where he averaged 12.4 points and 4.3 assists per game over two years. After graduating from GSU, Odom decided to use his final season of eligibility at Tulsa.

Despite being coached by three different staffs, the veteran Odom has remained much the same player over the course of his career. He’s an excellent distributor: this year, his assist rate is over 30, a mark which places him among the top 70 players in the country. He’s a capable downhill scorer: this year, nearly 35% of his total shot diet has consisted of layups and dunks, of which he’s made an impressive 72.7%. He’s a productive on-ball defender: this year, he sports a respectable steal rate of 2.0%.

Odom’s fatal flaw is his complete inability to shoot three-pointers — he’s harmless as a catch-and-shoot threat. If you’re beginning to notice a pattern, you’re right to do so. Although Tulsa is one of 50 most three-point oriented teams in the country, they field almost no consistent long-range shooters.

The exception to this rule is wing Keaston Willis, who many of you might remember from his time at Louisiana Tech. Willis transferred to Tulsa in 2023 but missed almost the entirely of last season with a foot injury; now healthy, he’s back to being essentially the same player he was at Tech. Willis is a volume three-point shooter currently making 36.8% of his triples, right in line with his career mark of 37.6%. Konkol utilizes him as the team’s primary catch-and-shoot threat and little else: Willis attempts fewer than two two-pointers per game.

Forwards Braeden Carrington and Justin Amadi man the frontcourt alongside centers Ian Smikle and Matt Reed — capable interior defender Jared Garcia is out for the year and productive forward Isaiah Barnes has been out for several weeks with a hand injury.

Carrington, a Minnesota transfer, is a good, disruptive defender who boasts the team’s highest steal rate — his problem? You guessed it: he’s 19-75 from beyond the arc, good for a rate of 25.3%. The single worst volume shooter in the AAC per hoop-math, Carrington also isn’t an interior scoring threat, having attempted just 19 two-pointers this year (even fewer than Willis!).

Amadi, a James Madison transfer, is another good defender and a solid rebounder; however, he’s perhaps the least versatile scorer on the team. Amadi is completely confined to the rim and the paint on offense, where he’s been a below-average finisher. He’s also saddled with the lowest assist rate of any Golden Hurricane player. Amadi’s penchant for drawing fouls has kept him relevant in the rotation, but the injuries to Garcia and Barnes have really restricted Tulsa’s options.

Smikle is Konkol’s go-to option at center; 2024 AAC All-Freshman Team selection Reed serves as his backup. Both men are 6’10” and roughly 235 pounds. Smikle is an excellent rebounder who only attempts shots at the rim, while Reed is another good rebounder capable of knocking down a three-pointer. Smikle is the better defender, and Reed is the better scorer, although neither is a particularly dynamic offensive threat.

The combined offensive limitations of Carrington, Amadi, Smikle, and Reed force almost all of the Golden Hurricane’s offense to route through the backcourt.

To round out Tulsa’s rotation:

• G Jaye Nash and G Jesaiah McWright

  • Nash was recently named the American Freshman of the Week for his 10-assist performance against Southwestern Christian, while McWright made 4/5 three-pointers in the same game. Backups to Archie, Odom, and Willis, it would be surprising if either man sees more than 10 minutes today.

The lineup we’re going to see most often is Archie, Odom, Willis, Carrington, and Smikle — Konkol has put that group on the floor for over 25% of possible minutes during the last five games.

Outlook

If UAB falls today, it would mark almost indisputably the worst loss of the Kennedy era. UAB hasn’t been defeated by a team ranked 264th or lower in KenPom since January 23rd, 2020, when 5-14 Southern Miss beat the Blazers in Bartow Arena.

On paper, the Green and Gold should take this one. Although the downhill attacking tandem of Odom and Archie could give the Blazers trouble, and Willis has tended to shoot well in his five career games against UAB, it’s hard to see the path through which the Golden Hurricane could stop UAB from scoring.

The Green and Gold will enjoy a pronounced frontcourt advantage and likely a pronounced shot volume advantage: Tulsa gives up offensive rebounds at a bottom-100 rate in the country, while UAB grabs them at the 11th-highest rate in the country. Tulsa also rarely forces turnovers, while UAB rarely commits them. Even if the Blazers suffer a cold shooting night, they’ll have ample offensive opportunities. Sans a three-point explosion, the Golden Hurricane will struggle to keep pace with their hosts.

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Game Information

UAB (7-6, KenPom #138) at UNT (9-3, KenPom #71)

📅: Tuesday, December 31st, 2024

🕒: 3:00 PM CST

🏟️: Denton, Texas — The Super Pit

📺: ESPNU

📻: WJQX 100.5 FM

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Trends and Odds

UAB enters the afternoon at 7-6 overall, having won three of its last four games — granted, all three wins came against the SWAC. The Blazers have moved up nine KenPom spots since their disastrous December 15th loss to Arkansas State, but their #138 ranking still places them sixth among AAC teams.

North Texas enters the afternoon at 9-3 overall, boasting an impressive resume that includes wins over Minnesota, Oregon State, and Northern Iowa. UNT has won three games in a row, albeit against weak competition. The Mean Green’s #71 KenPom ranking places them second among AAC teams — they trail only Memphis.

UAB is 0-1 against teams in the KenPom top 100; in fact, they’re 1-6 against teams in the KenPom top 250, with their November win against Southeastern Louisiana marking their sole victory over a quality opponent. Against Arkansas State — the only team of UNT’s caliber they’ve played — the Blazers lost after blowing a 27-point lead.

All of North Texas’ losses have come against members of the KenPom top 125, including the same High Point squad that took down UAB in November. UNT has dominated inferior competition, sporting a perfect 9-0 record against teams ranked 130th or lower in KenPom.

FanDuel gives the Blazers a 29.85% implied probability of beating North Texas and has set the spread at UNT -5.5, while KenPom gives the Blazers a 20% probability of beating North Texas and has set the spread at UNT -9.

Series History

UAB holds a 10-8 all-time record against UNT, making the series one of the Blazers’ most fiercely contested.

North Texas has perhaps been UAB’s defining basketball rival of the Kennedy era. The teams have met ten times since the start of the COVID pandemic; although the Blazers have edged out a 6-4 lead in the recent series, the UNT games are always among the most dreaded and memorable on the calendar.

There was last season’s thriller in Denton, in which UAB erased a 17-point deficit and proceeded to force overtime with less than a second left on the clock.

Butta Johnson scored five of UAB’s ten points in the extra period, and the Blazers snapped North Texas’ 17-game home winning streak.

There was the grueling 2023 campaign that saw North Texas sweep the regular-season series against UAB, lose to Jelly Walker’s Blazers in the Conference USA tournament, and then go on to beat the same Blazers in the NIT championship.

The games were marked by several epic duels between Walker and UNT’s Tylor Perry — although Walker killed Perry’s NCAA Tournament hopes, Perry eventually got the last laugh when he splashed an NIT-winning dagger over Walker’s outstretched arm.

There was the 2022 heartbreaker in Bartow Arena in which Perry again crushed the Blazers’ spirits, nailing two last-minute threes to erase a seemingly insurmountable deficit.

There were the three consecutive victories UAB picked up in Denton from March 2021 to January 2022. During the first two, the Blazers overcame masterful performances from the Mean Green’s Javion Hamlet to beat UNT on back-to-back days of a COVID-era road trip; during the third, UAB rode Walker and Trey Jemison to one of its most impressive wins of the season.

In the last four years, the away team has won 75% of the series’ games. If history repeats itself, the Blazers have a good chance of picking up a win at the Super Pit today — they’ve done it four times since 2021, after all.

North Texas Scouting Report

Two years ago, North Texas posted one of the greatest seasons in school history, winning 31 games, skyrocketing to 31st in KenPom, and taking home the NIT title for the first time ever. Unfortunately, much of their success came at the expense of UAB, and many Blazer fans were relieved to see coach Grant McCasland and guard Tylor Perry depart Denton during the 2023 offseason.

That did not stop the machine. Although the following season’s UNT squad didn’t quite replicate the achievements of its predecessor, McCasland disciple Ross Hodge kept the program’s identity unchanged. The grueling tempo stayed the same; the ferocious defense stayed the same; even the tradition of the star guard stayed the same, as JUCO transfer Jason Edwards — formerly of Miles College — took the reins from Perry, who himself once took the reins from Hamlet.

Hodge, Edwards and crew led the Mean Green to a 74th-place KenPom finish last season, a mark that put them among the AAC’s elite; however, for the first time in several years, UNT was unable to best UAB. Behind the aforementioned Lendeborg buzzer-beater coupled with a dominant effort in Bartow, the Blazers swept North Texas and relegated them to a distant seventh on the conference leaderboard.

Here’s to replicating that feat. The Mean Green once again sport an all-new look. Although Hodge is still roaming the sidelines in Denton, Edwards is gone, as is nearly the entirely of UNT’s ‘23-’24 roster. Despite the massive personnel turnover, one of college basketball’s most consistent programs has remained consistent — North Texas is again a healthy 71st in KenPom and currently fields one of the best defenses in the country.

For the first time in several seasons, the Mean Green don’t have a ball-dominant superstar in the backcourt. Fairfield transfer Jasper Floyd and Drake transfer Atin Wright, who you may remember from his 20-point performance against UAB in December 2023, form a steady, veteran tandem, but neither of them possess the sheer gravitational pull of Edwards, Perry, or Hamlet.

Although not a particularly gifted shooter, Floyd is UNT’s starting point guard and possesses the tools to contribute as an offensive role player. He initiates many of the Mean Green’s actions, serving as the team’s pick-and-roll ballhandler nearly 50% of the time, and sports a top-150 assist rate in the nation.

Floyd really shines in pressure defense, as evidenced by his 3.5% steal rate. Per hoop-explorer, he ranks 2nd in the AAC in defensive RAPM (regularized adjusted plus/minus).

Wright, the Mean Green’s leading per-game scorer, is an all-around excellent offensive player. He doesn’t turn the ball over; he rarely commits fouls; he makes his free throws at an elite clip. Wright is also hitting nearly 38% of his three-pointers despite attempting over six of them per game. This is not an anomaly — he made 40% of his 155 three-pointers last season at Drake. The worst thing you can say about Wright is that his 6’1” frame saddles him with defensive limitations, but it’s hard to isolate a single weak link in UNT’s system.

I’m confident Wright’s name is at the top of Andy Kennedy’s scouting report — the Blazers have already seen what he’s capable of.

G/F Rondel Walker is back for his second season under Hodge, and his role has remained largely the same: defend, box out, and be a general bother. Walker takes a backseat on offense, scoring just 5.5 points per game and using a minuscule 12.1% of possessions. However, his 6’5” frame allows him to grab boards at a high rate — he’s second on the team in rebounds — and play flexible wing defense. Walker ranks fourth in the AAC in defensive RAPM, just two spots behind his teammate Floyd.

F Brennan Lorient is perhaps North Texas’ greatest success story. You might remember Lorient as a former Florida Atlantic backup power forward; the Florida native spent the last two seasons in Boca Raton but never saw consistent playing time, taking a backseat to Vlad Goldin, Johnell Davis, Alijah Martin, and even Giancarlo Rosado.

Hodge has turned the former benchwarmer into a force to be reckoned with. Lorient is now one of the conference’s best shot-blockers, but that skill was apparent even when he was riding the pine at FAU. What’s been more impressive is Lorient’s offensive transformation — he’s become the Mean Green’s primary frontcourt scoring option. The athletic 215-pounder is mobile in space, often serving as a cutter and P&R roll man, and is making 60% of his two-point attempts while drawing nearly five fouls per 40 minutes.

Lorient averages 10.8 points per game in just 22.8 minutes per game. Although he doesn’t start, he’s a much more dynamic offensive option than typical PF starter Grant Newell.

6’9, 245-pound C Moulaye Sissoko, back for his third year in Denton, anchors the Mean Green’s interior. Although he’s an underwhelming shot-blocker for his size, Sissoko is among the conference’s best rebounders, hauling in over 26% of defensive rebounds when he’s on the floor. Like many players we’ve discussed today, Sissoko is invisible on offense but very present on defense; he ranks first in the AAC in defensive RAPM, ahead of Floyd and Walker.

To round out North Texas’ rotation:

• G Latrell Jossell is the backup option to Floyd and Wright. He’s a good shooter, an aggressive defender in the vein of Floyd, and a player with the tools to initiate action and distribute the ball. Like Wright, Jossell is 6’1”; I’m curious to see whether or not Hodge uses the small lineup of Wright and Jossell against UAB’s physical guards and wings.

• F Grant Newell is a massive, 6’9” wing that fits into the typical mold of a UNT defender but, as previously mentioned, isn’t much of an offensive threat.

• F Johnathan Massie is another wing that fits the profile of the UNT defense. Think of him as an upgraded version of Newell — although he’s by no means an offensive weapon, Massie has shot better than Newell, rebounded better than Newell, and caused more defensive disruption than Newell this season.

Outlook

Although the names on the uniforms are mostly different, this is a North Texas team we’ve seen before. The Mean Green possess size and aggressiveness at nearly every position; their versatility has led KenPom to deem their defense one of the nation’s 30 best.

Andy Kennedy has complained at length about UAB’s lack of physicality. After the Blazers’ most recent win over Alcorn State, he said, “This team does not play with enough force. I can’t get certain guys — one of which wears number 3 — to roll to the basket. Everything’s perimeter. And this team cannot live on the perimeter.”

Well, this is a trial by fire.

November 1985

The Western Kentucky Hilltoppers were one of the most successful mid-major programs of the 1960s and 1970s, posting 16 winning seasons, appearing in eight NCAA Tournaments, and reaching one Final Four over the course of two decades. Their dominance was particularly pronounced at the conference level: a founding member of the Ohio Valley Conference, WKU shared or outright won 19 league titles during its 33 years of membership.

OVC basketball was an intensely local affair in the 70s, a time when the league was made up of WKU, Morehead State, Eastern Kentucky, Murray State, Middle Tennessee State, Tennessee Tech, East Tennessee State, and Austin Peay. As was the case with many of the era’s conferences, it was a true bus league, meaning all of its members were within a couple hours’ drive of one another. “Ohio Valley” was a rule, not a suggestion.

Although its geographic density kept travel costs down, the OVC’s roster of small, regional, public schools also limited the conference’s all-important earning potential. As the industry of college sports grew more and more lucrative, regionalism came to be viewed less as a laudable quality and more as a hindrance. In the 1986 words of former WKU president John Minton: “The OVC over the years was faced with the problem of exposure. There was a bit of a feeling that if you could get out of the OVC, you could break out of the mold of regionalism.”

Even before the advent of today’s sports media ecosystem, a league with the OVC’s profile was never going to compete in major advertising and television markets, a fact WKU’s administration had recognized by the early 80s. The Hilltoppers wanted to cash in the success of their basketball program in exchange for exposure; a young, burgeoning Sun Belt Conference offered them the opportunity to do just that. Founded in 1976, the SBC never concerned itself with being a bus league, name aside.

“Geographically, the six teams seem worlds apart,” read a 1976 Raleigh News & Observer article, referring to Charlotte, Georgia State, Jacksonville, New Orleans, South Alabama, and South Florida, the conference’s inaugural members. Instead of chasing OVC-style geographic density, the SBC initially sought out Southern metropolitan universities, a philosophy further evidenced by the league’s 1979 additions of UAB and VCU.

By the turn of the decade, the SBC had produced several excellent basketball teams, with none being greater than Charlotte’s 1977 Final Four squad. These successes, in combination with the conference’s presence in populous metro areas, earned the league an impressive distribution package. During the 1981-1982 basketball season, two SBC games were broadcast on national television, three were broadcast on regional television, 13 were broadcast on ESPN — the Sun Belt was the first conference to sign a long-term deal with ESPN — and seven were broadcast on the league’s own television network.

This was enough to sell WKU. On March 8th, 1982, the university’s board of regents unanimously voted to withdraw from the OVC and accept an invitation to join the Sun Belt Conference.

“The potential [in the Sun Belt] for those areas in revenue income is much greater than we can expect in the Ohio Valley Conference,” said WKU president Donald Zacharias, who later estimated that one national television appearance would cover the Hilltoppers’ travel expenses for up to three years. “Our opportunity for national and regional television exposure [in the Sun Belt] is much greater than it would be [in the OVC].”

Western Kentucky began Sun Belt play immediately; they were picked a semi-generous fifth out of eight in the 1982-1983 conference preseason media poll. WKU head coach Clem Haskins was optimistic about his team’s fortunes, although he did acknowledge the step up in competition would be drastic, calling the ‘82-’83 schedule “the most difficult in Western history.” Jim Greisch, sports editor of the Madisonville, Kentucky paper, concurred, writing: “For years, Western had the only real big man in the OVC… Now, Western is entering a league filled with 6-9 and 6-10 players.”

Although both Haskins and Greisch held measured expectations, neither man adequately predicted the extent to which the Hilltoppers would struggle to adapt to their new league. WKU, which hadn’t finished below .500 in conference play since 1973, posted a 4-10 conference record in ‘82-’83, a 5-9 conference record in ‘83-’84, and a 5-9 conference record in ‘84-’85. The Toppers were never apocalyptically bad during this stretch, but Western Kentucky fans were spoiled from years of OVC dominance; in the early months of 1985, rumors began to circulate that Haskins wasn’t long for Bowling Green. Although the WKU board publicly reaffirmed its commitment to the coach, it was clear his seat was getting warmer and warmer.

“We jumped into a situation where we had no idea the Sun Belt Conference was this tough from top to bottom,” Haskins would later say. “I underestimated the conference as a coach, and so did our fans.”

Thus, Haskins entered the 1985-1986 season tasked with proving that the Hilltoppers could compete in the Sun Belt, and furthermore, that he was the right man to lead them. For both team and coach, the path to respectability ran through Birmingham.

January 1986

For the first four years of their rivalry, coach Gene Bartow’s Blazers absolutely dominated Haskins’ squad.

The programs first met in the 1981 NCAA Tournament, when an Oliver Robinson-led UAB team drilled WKU by a final score of 93-68.

Things would only get worse after Western joined the Sun Belt, as the Blazers beat the Hilltoppers six times from January 1983 to March 1985, winning each game by an average margin of eight points. At the beginning of the 1985-1986 season, UAB’s all-time record against WKU was an astonishing 7-1.

But by the first month of 1986, it was clear that this was not the same old Western Kentucky. Thanks to an impressive non-conference resume that included wins over Middle Tennessee, Cincinnati, and #19 Auburn, morale around the program was the highest it has been in nearly half a decade — the Hilltoppers boasted a sparkling record of 9-3 at January’s halfway point. On the verge of unemployment less than a year prior, Haskins was now being mentioned as a candidate for high-major jobs.

WKU’s dream season continued when the Hilltoppers pulled off an overtime upset of UAB in Birmingham on January 16th. This was no slouch of a Blazer squad; led by All-American guard Steve Mitchell, the Green and Gold were ranked 12th in the nation and had previously lost only two games all season. It was Western’s highest-ranked Sun Belt win of all time and their first-ever win at the BJCC. Haskins was highly aware of the significance of the victory, as was the Birmingham Post-Herald, which titled its recap article “Hilltoppers finally climb UAB mountain.”

“This means a whole lot to us,” Haskins said. “We’re trying to compete with all the big ones, and the only way to get recognition is to beat people like UAB. This should prove to our critics that we can compete in the tough Sun Belt Conference.”

However, not all observers were convinced. There was a prevailing sentiment that the Blazers had given the game away more than the Hilltoppers had won it. UAB held a nine-point lead with 12 minutes remaining but saw its advantage evaporate after a series of unfortunate events, some of which were out of the Blazers’ control. Bartow’s team committed 22 turnovers on the night, had two late points wiped off the board by a questionable basket interference call on forward Anthony Gordon, had a potential Steve Mitchell game-winner bounce off the rim, and was finally sunk by a highly contested buzzer-beater from WKU’s Billy Gordon.

“We didn’t get much credit for winning that game,” said Haskins. “Everybody said, ‘Golly, that was a fluke.’”

Although Bartow gave the Hilltoppers props for playing well, he didn’t sound like a man that believed his team had been beaten outright.

“Turnovers when we took the lead killed us,” he said. “This was a typical last-three-years exhibition of hot-doggishness and sickening turnovers when we have a chance to put someone away… This is one of the most sickening losses I’ve ever been associated with.”

“I think we had [Billy Gordon] defensed,” Bartow added. “He just hit a great shot.”

Blazer guard Michael Charles, on the other hand, was more explicit: WKU got lucky.

“What does bother me is that Western shouldn’t have beaten us last time,” Charles said in an interview conducted prior to the teams’ next meeting. “Don’t get me wrong, I think they’ve got a good team. But I think we’re better.”

It was clear that UAB believed the Hilltoppers’ win to be a blip on the radar, while WKU was adamant it represented their emergence onto the big stage. There was only one way to settle this: round two, this time in E.A. Diddle Arena. Described by multiple outlets as the Sun Belt’s presumptive game of the year, the January 25th rematch was played with the rivals now tied atop the conference standings.

The Mars Bars Game

The scene in Bowling Green was like nothing Western Kentucky had seen in years.

“We’ve put people in places we didn’t even know we had,” said WKU SID Paul Just.

The audience that gathered to watch the Blazers square off against the Hilltoppers exceeded Diddle Arena’s capacity; at over 13,300, it represented the stadium’s largest crowd since 1980. Scattered throughout the arena was a sizable contingent of visiting UAB supporters, many of which had been ferried up I-65 by student buses. Distributed among this great mass of people were thousands of complimentary Mars Bars.

At one end of the arena hung a banner triumphantly proclaiming the Hilltoppers’ intent to reshape the Sun Belt power hierarchy: “UAB is a thing of the past, WKU is here at last.”

Doing battle in front of this enraptured crowd were two teams known for their physicality and toughness. As Post-Herald reporter Roger Shuler wrote:

The areas around the baskets may look like a scene from “Rambo” tonight when the UAB Blazers and Western Kentucky University square off.

It will be a matchup of the Sun Belt Conference’s two most physical teams. Both have plenty of height, bulk, and sheer nastiness among their front-line players.

UAB had at its disposal a stable of frontcourt players, the most productive of whom were Jerome Mincy, Archie Johnson, and Anthony “Big Jack” Gordon. Mincy was the star of the group, the name at the top of any scouting report. The Memphis native averaged 14.1 points and 8.4 rebounds per game during the 1985-1986 season, a performance that would earn him All-Sun Belt honors and a fifth-round selection in the 1986 NBA Draft. When asked which UAB players he was most worried about, Haskins fingered Mincy and guard Steve Mitchell as the Blazers’ two biggest threats.

WKU’s frontline was manned by towering forwards Kannard Johnson, Tellis Frank, and Clarence Martin, the first two of whom would go on to play in the NBA and the latter of whom was an Alexander City native who spurned the Blazers to play for Haskins at Western. Martin was a well-known enforcer on the court; UAB was familiar with his antics, as he broke Mincy’s nose in a January 1984 game and flagrantly fouled Mitchell in a February 1985 game. Martin ripped down ten rebounds in the rivals’ January 16th meeting and would play an even more central role in the second contest.

To further exacerbate any potential nastiness, both the Blazers and the Hilltoppers entered the night running high on emotion. UAB was mired in frustration, having dropped a game to DePaul after their original loss to Western. Their poll rating had plummeted from 12th to 18th, guard James Ponder was suffering through an extended shooting slump, and the team’s chemistry was in question. Western, on the other hand, was now 12-3 on the season with the memory of Bartow’s “sickening” comments fresh in their minds.

“The pressure is on them,” said Haskins. “I hope what Coach Bartow said will inspire [our players]. I’m fired up. We know the importance of this game.”

Tipoff

UAB started Steve Mitchell, James Ponder, Michael Charles, Jerome Mincy, and Archie Johnson, while WKU started Billy Gordon, the hero of the first game, James McNary, the SBC assists leader who missed the first game with an injury, Kannard Johnson, Clarence Martin, and Fred Tisdale.

It was McNary who opened the scoring with a baseline fadeaway, but UAB’s backcourt duo briefly silenced the partisan crowd. Ponder nailed a jumper from the top of the key. The incomparable Mitchell drained two deep buckets to give the Blazers their first lead of the game.

Ponder and Mitchell continued to dazzle for much of the first half, combining to score UAB’s first 12 points, but the Hilltoppers seemed to have a response to every Blazer basket. A nasty cut opened up on Jerome Mincy’s forehead as Haskins’ squad began to assert dominance over the boards; the Hilltoppers pounded the offensive glass, sending in wave after wave of bench players to gash the Blazers on the interior. Standing just 6’3” tall, the little-used Ray Swogger slipped through the trees and scored four points off putbacks, reigniting the Diddle Arena faithful. Bartow directed a tirade at the officials during the first media timeout, but it did little to quell the home team’s onslaught. The UAB coach would later call WKU’s first-half offensive rebounding “the best I’ve ever seen.”

Mitchell, who single-handedly kept the Blazers within striking distance for much of the first period, entered the locker room with 17 points, but the efforts of Gordon, Martin, and the reserves Frank and Swogger staked the Hilltoppers to a 44-36 halftime lead.

“They’re a big team and our big people had been struggling a little,” Bartow said. “We probably became too guard-oriented tonight.”

“It was a very aggressive, physical game,” Mincy said. “We knew they had one of the strongest frontlines in the league, and they had more bench power than we did. That was the difference.”

The opening minutes of the second half went similarly poorly for the Blazers — their deficit remained unchanged, and WKU continued to dominate the interior.

It seemed UAB had at last caught a break when the Hilltoppers’ Martin, who scored ten points in the first half, picked up two rapid-fire whistles, bringing him to four fouls on the night. Haskins elected to keep the forward on the court, a decision which quickly backfired after Martin attempted to jump over Mincy for his second putback dunk of the game. The officials deemed the play an offensive foul, and with 12:38 remaining, the Hilltoppers had lost their enforcer.

The admittedly-borderline call did not sit well with the rambunctious Diddle crowd: several members of the WKU faithful began to shower the court with cups, ice, and Mars Bars, which somehow remained uneaten over an hour after most fans entered the doors. Many of these projectiles were launched with intent and malice, directed at the man who described losing to Western Kentucky as “sickening.” Per a recollection published in the Post-Herald, one candy bar hit Bartow in the leg, while another whizzed by his head.

UAB forward Bruce Baker, an enforcer in his own right, grabbed one of the bars and hurled it back into the crowd. Brent Woods of The College Heights Herald claimed that Baker nailed a spectator in the face.

Woods attempted to exonerate the WKU student section of wrongdoing, writing that the students were corralled in the cheap nosebleed seats and that the bars likely came from the lower levels; whoever the culprit, the Blazer bench was furious. Bartow attempted to pull his team off the court before Haskins grabbed the PA mic and begged Western’s supporters to stop throwing candy.

With the encouragement of their coach, the crowd eventually calmed down. It wasn’t long before the floor was clear and play was ready to resume, now with additional security behind the UAB bench. Surprisingly, the Blazers immediately looked more composed than they had all night — Mincy sparked a furious comeback that saw WKU’s nine-point lead disappear in the blink of an eye. A 10-1 UAB run tied the game at 65 with fewer than four minutes left on the game clock.

The Blazers and Hilltoppers traded buckets for the next several minutes, but just as he had in the first game, WKU’s Gordon hit a crucial baseline jumper to give his team a late lead. The score was now 73-71 with 1:15 left. Ponder’s subsequent jumper couldn’t find paydirt, and in the era of the 45-second shot clock, the Blazers were forced into a cycle of fouling. Six free throws gave the home team its first — and to this day only — conference sweep of UAB. Western Kentucky had arrived.

On the UAB side of things, much of the postgame discussion was shaped by the candy-throwing incident. Western Kentucky’s fans were known to be rowdy — in 1984, Bowling Green businessman Ken Johnson taunted a Carson-Newman player into the Diddle Arena stands, where the player was struck over the head with a folding chair — and it wasn’t the first time Bartow had taken issue with their sportsmanship. He again ripped the Hilltopper faithful during his postgame radio show.

“In my 24 years of coaching, that’s the first time I’ve ever been hit with anything,” he said. “It really bothers me.”

The UAB coach then refused to make an appearance at the subsequent press conference, although he validated WKU at long last: “We just got beat.”

On the other hand, Western’s postgame discussion mostly glossed over the incident. In the days following the game, there was some editorializing in the local papers about how WKU fans needed to be better, but in the moment, an ecstatic Hilltopper team did nothing but celebrate.

“I don’t have the words to explain how I feel right now,” Haskins said. “…There’s no doubt that UAB is now our biggest rival in the Sun Belt Conference.”

“I’m thrilled with the performance, and the crowd was the sixth man tonight,” he added. “…There was no way [we] were going to lose in front of this sellout crowd.”

Haskins would later attempt to handwave away the whole affair, saying, “The [incident] was blown way out of proportion by the news media. There was some ice and one candy bar thrown. And the person was taken down and booked. We’d just like to drop the whole thing.”

Aftermath

Although the Mars Bars game remains one of the odder incidents in Blazer basketball history, it didn’t receive much national coverage. However, it did serve as the basis for significant rule changes after UAB was faced with a similar situation the following week. In the wake of the loss at Diddle, the Blazers dusted themselves off, beat South Florida, then headed to Old Dominion, where a crowd just as raucous as Western Kentucky’s awaited them.

That crowd proceeded to dump ice and trash onto the Blazer bench after another unfavorable offensive foul call. A swarm of fans attempted to grab UAB’s players, with one taking a swing at Bartow. ODU supporters pelted the Blazers with drinks as they made their escape into the locker room.

The incident was even more severe than the one at WKU and lacked the quaint charm of the candy bar barrage. Bartow theorized that the Blazers had become a target because of their status as a Sun Belt titan.

“It was a bad night for college basketball,” he said. “I’ve been in coaching 24 years and in the last two games I’ve seen more ugliness than in all the other years combined.”

SBC commissioner Vic Bubas immediately issued an order implementing the following rules at all conference games:

• Additional security near team benches.

• All home team coaches and athletic administrators must be more visible and quicker to use public address systems to warn crowds that technical fouls might be called.

• Cheerleaders and mascots must be warned about taunting opposing players.

• Promotional items that can be thrown onto the court, such as candy bars or megaphones, must be handed out after games or such promotions will be discontinued.

Bartow welcomed the rule changes, although he was offended by Bubas’ reprimand of “every school and coach involved,” believing the Blazers were the clear victims in both situations. Already-circulating rumors of UAB’s desire to leave the Sun Belt intensified after this incident — that’s a story for another time.

As for Western Kentucky, the Mars Bars game did, in fact, prove they were capable of competing in the Sun Belt. WKU went on to finish second in the conference standings — one spot above UAB — an achievement they parlayed into an NCAA Tournament berth. Both Haskins and his Hilltoppers were given their long-awaited recognition; the early-80s perception of them as a program clinging to memories of OVC glory was no more.

Haskins would be hired by Minnesota over the offseason, but WKU continued rolling under new coach Murray Arnold. The following season, they’d win the Sun Belt regular season title for the first time in program history and make another NCAA Tournament.

But one persistent obstacle remained in the Hilltoppers’ way. At the end of the 1985-1986 campaign, WKU and UAB met in the BJCC once more, this time in the conference tournament. After the Blazers’ opening-round win over South Alabama, many fans in Green and Gold stuck around to root for South Florida, the opening-round opponent of the hated Toppers. The Bulls couldn’t pull off the victory, so UAB had to do it themselves, demolishing WKU in the semifinals by a score of 57-45. In a cathartic display, the Blazers smothered the Hilltopper frontcourt, holding Tellis Frank, Kannard Johnson, and Clarence Martin to 12 points combined.

In the title game of the 1987 conference tournament, UAB made a return trip to Diddle Arena to take on the Sun Belt regular season champions, upsetting the hosts 72-70 behind an impressive outing from guard Tracy Foster.

The defeat would send the Hilltoppers into Sun Belt purgatory. Graduation and transfer losses soon ravaged the WKU roster, and they wouldn’t be relevant in league play again until 1992, the year after the Blazers moved to Great Midwest Conference.

Western Kentucky won the battle. UAB won the war.

That went better than last time.

In a welcome departure from 2023’s pitiful showing, the UAB men’s basketball team smashed Alcorn State in a stress-free Sunday matinee — no Butta Johnson heroics needed. The offense hummed along, capitalizing on its talent and size advantages in a way it couldn’t last November. Led by Bradley Ezewiro’s season-high 19 points, the Blazers scored at a rate of 1.40 points per possession in today’s victory, their best performance of the year.

Seven different players contributed seven or more points, with Ezewiro, Yaxel Lendeborg, and Christian Coleman combining to make 17 of 21 field goals. Although Alcorn State scored at a 1.14 PPP rate in response, much of the Braves’ offense was carried by heroic three-point shooting performances from guards Keionte Cornelius and Jalyke Gaines-Wyatt.

Of course, all is not perfect in paradise: Andy Kennedy criticized UAB’s weak perimeter shooting and lack of assertiveness in his postgame presser, Greg Gordon is still sick with the flu, and Makhi Myles missed today’s game with the same ailment.

With the victory, UAB improves to 10-0 all-time against Alcorn State. The Braves now hold the honor of being the Blazers’ second-most-dominated opponent, tied with Alabama State and trailing only Alabama A&M. UAB also improves to a smooth 69-0 all-time against the SWAC, which is apparently a more impressive feat than it may appear.

Chris Cokley Cupcake Crusher Player of the Game Award

This award is christened in honor of former Blazer forward Chris Cokley, who scored more career points against sub-.500 opponents than any other UAB player of the last 20 years. Today’s recipient is forward Bradley Ezewiro, who enjoyed his finest game to date in a UAB uniform, grabbing four rebounds, shooting 5/5 from the floor, and making all nine of his free throws. Ezewiro said:

The adjustment [coming into the season] was hard. The first couple games, I wasn’t shooting the ball well, I wasn’t really defending the way I should have. I just needed a game to hang my hat on and just know that I can do it at this level with this team. We have a really talented team, a lot of good frontcourt guys, a lot of good guards, so just trying to find your way every night and trying to find where you fit in every single day — I find joy in that, finding what I can do for this team every single day.

Ezewiro broke ten points for only the third time this season, a performance that encouraged Kennedy, who said:

”It’s the fourth time that [Ezewiro] has had to learn new plays, new terminology, new expectations, new everything. My hope is that he’s — even though he’s not a junior college kid — if you remember our JUCO guys [last season], especially Chris and Yax, they started finding their form right around Christmas, and it helped them propel into being really good players in conference [play]. My hope is that’s what Brad is going to do too, that that is his trajectory, and today was a great example of him being aggressive at the basket and finishing.”

Honorable mention: F Yaxel Lendeborg

Another suitable candidate for the award is Lendeborg, who received the KenPom game MVP while nearly making history. With five points, six rebounds, and four assists at halftime and 10/10/6 at the 11:30 mark, the senior forward was briefly on pace for UAB’s first triple-double since 2009. Although he didn’t end up getting it, benched for good around the five-minute mark with a statline of 14/12/6, Lendeborg became the closest UAB player to a triple-double since… himself, three weeks ago.

But I bring up Lendeborg less to discuss the triple-double chase, which I’ve talked to death recently, and more to segue into a point Kennedy made after the game: this team struggles to shoot and needs to become less perimeter-oriented.

Clean looks, again, for our first time viewers, mean the right guy taking the right shot for him, typically a perimeter shot. It doesn’t have to be a three-pointer, but it’s just gotta be clean, a good look for him. I’ve been doing this stat for — this is my 18th season and I’ve only had one team shoot under 50%. The goal is about 55% on clean looks, because you’re going to have to take some contested looks, and those contested looks are certainly not scored at the same efficiency. So clean looks need to be around 55%, and I’ve only had one team in the history of my coaching career that was under 50%, and that was last year’s team. [They were] right around 49%.

Coming into tonight, this team [was at] 35%. Tonight, [they go] 10-28, so that number will go down again. We have to start making shots or it’s going to put an incredible pressure on the rest of us.

Kennedy’s assertions are backed up by publicly available data: UAB is shooting just 30.3% on jump shots Synergy classifies as “unguarded,” a rate that puts the Blazers in the 4th percentile nationally. Against Alcorn, UAB made 32% of its threes and 37.5% of its unguarded jump shots. Kennedy’s struggle has been getting the Blazers — and Lendeborg in particular — to recognize this and be more assertive in attacking the basket. As Kennedy described in the presser:

This team does not play with enough force. I can’t get certain guys — one of which wears number 3 — to roll to the basket. Everything’s perimeter. And this team cannot live on the perimeter…

… So I’m saying we have to win the points in the paint, so let’s roll, let’s roll against an Alcorn State who, obviously, you have a size advantage [over] and against an Alcorn State who was doing like us and switching all ball screens, meaning big to little, little to big. Many times we had Yax on a roll — I thought in the second half he did a much better job of being assertive — but he’s just not being as assertive as I know he’s capable of.

What’s Next?

Despite the two-game winning streak, there is much work to be done. UAB finishes non-conference play 7-6, having lost every game it has played against a KenPom top-200 team. As it currently stands, the Blazers’ best win is KenPom #217 Southeastern Louisiana. Their worst loss is KenPom #239 Vermont. The AAC preseason favorites are perhaps the sixth-best team in the conference today.

Kennedy acknowledged his team’s disappointing start in today’s presser — “it’s not nearly what any of us expected” — but emphasized the importance of learning from the losses and using Christmas break as a reset button.

Conference play begins on Tuesday, December 31st when UAB takes on North Texas at the Super Pit, a venue where the Blazers are 6-3 all-time. Despite losing nearly their entire team to the transfer portal, the Mean Green have perhaps improved since last season. They currently sit at #72 in KenPom with wins over Oregon State and Minnesota.

Game Information

UAB (5-6, KenPom #147) vs. Alabama A&M (4-6, KenPom #359)

📅: Wednesday, December 18th, 2024

🕒: 6:30 PM CST

🏟️: Bartow Arena

📺: ESPN+

📻: WJQX 100.5 FM

Trends and Odds

UAB enters tonight 5-6 overall in the wake of a 98-89 overtime loss to Arkansas State that saw the Blazers blow a 27-point lead, a collapse that matched the largest by any Division 1 team since 2018. The Blazers have fallen nearly 50 spots in KenPom over the last month. Alabama A&M enters tonight 4-6 overall but only 1-6 against Division 1 competition, having lost three consecutive games. KenPom ranks the Bulldogs the nation’s sixth-worst team.

UAB is 2-0 against teams in the KenPom bottom 70, having won both games by an average of 20.5 points, while the Bulldogs have been dominated by teams in the KenPom top 150, losing 93-45 to Georgia and 82-44 to Lipscomb. The Bulldogs are also yet to win a road game this season.

FanDuel gives the Blazers a 96.77% implied probability of beating Alabama A&M and has set the spread at 21.5, while KenPom gives the Blazers a 96% probability of beating Alabama A&M and has set the spread at 19.

Series History

UAB holds a 15-0 record against A&M, the Blazers’ best against any opponent

UAB and Alabama A&M first met on November 23rd, 1999. Murry Bartow’s squad entered the game on the heels of a close loss at #3 Auburn, a miserable shooting performance having prevented UAB from pulling the upset. The disheartened Blazers took their frustrations out on the overmatched Bulldogs, turning in a display of grit so impressive it prompted the Birmingham Post-Herald to title its article about the game “‘A’ for effort.” In distinct late-90s style, UAB beat reporter Cary Estes wrote:

Sure, the Backstreet Boys have some interesting moves and gyrations. But will Howie or A.J. or any of the Boys run full speed and dive headfirst over a table and onto a concrete floor?

For that kind of action Tuesday night, one needed to go to Bartow Arena and check out the Southside Boys. Otherwise known as the UAB Blazers.

The Blazers showed more hustle and grit and desire in Tuesday’s 82-53 victory over Alabama A&M than last season’s UAB team demonstrated in an entire month.

The result catalyzed a 9-4 stretch that would see UAB take down a ranked Louisville, along with strong Fresno State and South Florida teams. This renaissance was repeated in 2023, when a once-struggling UAB won 12 of its next 15 after beating the Bulldogs. Here’s to hoping this year’s Blazers, whose lack of physicality has been decried by Andy Kennedy, can parlay tonight’s game into a similar turnaround.

Alabama A&M Scouting Report

A&M head coach Otis Hughley is a basketball lifer with one of the most diverse backgrounds of any sitting Division 1 head coach. Over the course of his 31-year career, the 60-year-old has made stops at the high school, college, and NBA levels, has coached in China and Taiwan, and has coached the men’s and women’s national teams of multiple African and Asian countries. He actively leads the Senegalese women’s team.

Hughley arrived in Huntsville in 2022 and orchestrated swift improvement — under his hand, the Bulldogs reached the .500 mark in conference play for two consecutive seasons, a feat the program hadn’t accomplished since 2006. AAMU’s current record of 4-6 doesn’t look impressive, but each of the prior two Bulldog teams started similarly poorly.

Defense

Although the analytical rankings of this year’s Alabama A&M squad are the lowest they’ve been since Hughley’s tenure began, A&M’s defensive profile is very similar to what it was this time last season: roughly 350th in KenPom and solid at the rim but porous in the paint and behind the arc.

The Bulldogs’ strong rim defense can be attributed in large part to big man Chad Moodie, perhaps A&M’s best player. Although Moodie is by no means a traditional center, standing 6’8” tall, he’s nonetheless one of the SWAC’s best shot-blockers, currently rocking a block rate of 3.4%. Last season, Moodie finished the year with a block rate of 7.4%, good for a top-60 mark in the nation.

A&M’s other bigs are 7-footer Saliou Seye, 6-foot-9 Clance Crosby, 7-foot-3 Bol Kuir, and 6-foot-9 Angok Anyang. Hughley uses one of the deepest rotations in college basketball, sometimes burning through 14 players in the same game, and no member of the Bulldog frontcourt save Moodie sees more than 16 minutes an outing. Seye, a UTRGV transfer who isn’t much of a factor on the offensive end, is Moodie’s typical frontcourt partner, currently holding a block rate of 8.2%. Crosby is an impressive athlete that hasn’t seen much playing time, while Kuir and Anyang are afterthoughts.

The Bulldogs can swat shots at the rim, but their lack of skill makes their overall interior defense weak. A&M’s opponents have shot 54.8% against them in the paint, one of the highest rates in the country. The Bulldogs had the same problem in non-conference play last season, and UAB took full advantage of it during the teams’ December 2023 meeting, when Yaxel Lendeborg and Javian Davis combined to shoot 9-13 from the floor.

Hughley's 2024 squad has also been crippled by a 41.6% three-point percentage allowed. This number is absolutely unsustainable — as Will Warren recently wrote, the Bulldogs are major candidates for positive regression in this area and have been the victims of some bad luck, as their opponents have shot a red-hot 40.8% on unguarded jump shots.

Nevertheless, the fact that AAMU allows their opponents to generate so many unguarded jump shots in the first place speaks to their poor perimeter defense. UAB will get open looks — it will be up to them to make them. The Blazers have connected on just 28.6% of their unguarded jump shots this season, one of the lowest rates in the nation.

Offense

Owing to the team’s aforementioned massive rotation, it’s hard to nail down just one leader of the A&M offense. Point guard Darius Ford initiates most possessions and takes more shots than any of his teammates, but he’s been one of the nation’s least efficient players, having made just 33.7% of his 95 field goal attempts. A capable perimeter slasher, Moodie is the team’s most reliable option, doing all his damage on the interior. Wing A.C. Bryant is the team’s primary spot-up shooter, having made 45.5% of his three-point attempts (albeit on low volume).

Whoever the leader is, the results haven’t been good. The Bulldogs are void of dynamic ballhandling, turning the ball over at a nearly 20% rate and struggling to create open looks inside. They further lack finishing talent — no A&M guard save Lorenzo Downey has made more than 47% of their shots at the rim. This is compounded by A&M’s lack of production on the interior, as no big man other than Moodie is a consistent offensive option. These factors all contribute to the Bulldogs’ team two-point field goal percentage of 41.3%, which stands as a bottom-ten mark in the nation. There’s nothing going from beyond the arc, either — A&M has made less than 30% of their three-pointers.

Last season, the Bulldogs compensated for their lack of shooters by drawing fouls, posting the second-highest free throw rate in the country. Although A&M still gets to the line at a higher-than-average rate, they have been crippled by the departure of guard Dallin Smith, one of the country’s most prolific whistle-drawers. Last season, Smith posted a mindblowing free throw rate of 81.7 — you may remember him from his 27-point, 10-free throw performance against UAB. Bryant and Moodie both know their way to the charity stripe, but AAMU no longer has an equivalent to Smith.

Outlook

UAB needs to win this one by several dozen. Alabama A&M is the sixth-worst team in the nation by KenPom. The Blazers have a pronounced skill advantage on the interior, will get plenty of open looks from three, and shouldn’t face any serious defensive challenges. It was the Alabama A&M game that turned the 1999 season around; it was the Alabama A&M game that turned last season around. Let’s hope for the best.

Paul Delaney is one of the most versatile players to ever don a UAB uniform. Over the course of his prolific career, which stretched from 2004 to 2009, the guard proved himself an offensive threat, leading the Blazers in scoring in 2007, a dangerous rebounder, becoming the program’s all-time leader in boards among players shorter than 6’3”, and a pesky defender, earning two Conference USA All-Defense nods. To this day, Delaney is the only UAB player to have reached career marks of 1,400+ points, 460+ rebounds, 360+ assists, and 200+ steals.

It makes sense that Delaney is also the last UAB (men’s) player to have recorded a triple-double, a feat he accomplished during a February 4th, 2009 home game against Tulane. In the midst of what would turn out to be both his final and most productive season in a Blazer uniform, Delaney dropped 16 points, 12 assists, and ten rebounds on the heads of an overmatched Green Wave team, powering UAB to an 81-61 victory.

On December 6th, the similarly-multitalented Yaxel Lendeborg put together a Delaney-esque performance in UAB’s win over Prairie View A&M, stuffing the statsheet to the tune of 14 points, 12 rebounds, and six assists. Although Lendeborg did not quite break the triple-double threshold, a fact at which he later expressed his disappointment, he came just four assists shy of doing so.

Lendeborg’s attempt is not alone in the pantheon of near-misses: such luminaries as Aaron Johnson, Cameron Moore, and William Lee have come close to matching Delaney’s feat, but all have ultimately fallen short. By examining data from Sports-Reference, we can go back through the history of UAB’s 15-year triple-double drought.

Alan Ogg vs. Florida A&M - Dec. 16th, 1988

Stats: 14 points, 12 blocks, and 10 rebounds

Before we get started, it’s worth noting that Delaney was not the first UAB player to record a triple-double. Towering center Alan Ogg accomplished the feat in 1988 behind a whopping 12 blocks, a mark which still stands as UAB’s single-game record. “Ogg swats Florida A&M in Classic performance,” the next morning’s Birmingham Post-Herald headline read.

Ogg’s dominant outing nearly made college basketball history. With every Rattler shot he rejected, he inched closer to the single-game NCAA record of 14, held at the time by Navy’s David Robinson. According to the Post-Herald, UAB coach Gene Bartow “did everything he could to get Ogg the national record,” briefly resting Ogg late in the second half in the hope he’d have the energy to block two more shots.

“I knew something was up when Coach took me out,” Ogg said. “He said, ‘Go back in there and block everything you can.”

Ogg finished his career as UAB’s all-time leading shot-blocker, a title that was later taken from him by William Lee, but Ogg and Jerome Mincy remain the only two Blazers to have eclipsed ten blocks in a game.

Aaron Johnson vs. UTEP — Jan. 8th, 2011

Stats: 26 points, 14 assists, and 7 rebounds

After he ascended to the throne in 2009, Delaney’s status as the triple-double king went unchallenged for nearly two calendar years, with Robert Vaden, Channing Toney, and Jamarr Sanders each posting respectable statlines that ultimately fell short of the 10-10-10 threshold. Aaron Johnson was the first player of the 2010s to flirt with the feat, doing so in the midst of his senior All-American campaign.

Johnson was aided in his pursuit by the length of the Blazers’ wild 3OT victory over UTEP, a game that deserves an article of its own. The point guard was afforded every opportunity to accumulate stats. Although Johnson missed the game’s last 51.8 seconds with leg cramps, he played 54 minutes and attempted 17 field goals, earning the respect of UTEP head coach Tim Floyd.

“Both teams played their hearts out. That was a great college basketball game. I felt the key to the game was the little guy,” said Floyd, referring to the 5’8” Johnson. “We couldn’t guard him without putting him on the line.”

"You've just got to keep telling yourself that it's 0-0 again," said Johnson, describing how he stayed on the floor for nearly an hour. "No doubt, it's definitely tough, but fighters always get through it. If you're a fighter you can get through it. Tonight, we were fighters."

Perhaps Johnson wasn’t truly in striking distance of a triple-double, averaging just one rebound every 7.7 minutes, but John Hollinger’s Game Score metric still pegs this performance as the third-greatest of his storied career.

Cameron Moore vs. Murray St. — Nov. 20th, 2011

Stats: 15 points, 11 rebounds, and 7 blocks

One of the least forgettable players in UAB history, Cameron Moore’s triple-double bid ironically came in one of the most forgettable games in UAB history. En route to a 2-7 start, the 2011-2012 Blazers opened the season with a loss to Creighton before hosting a Murray State team that would finish the year with a record of 31-2. UAB wasted away an early lead, connecting on just 2 of its 14 three-point attempts, and the Racers eventually grinded their way a 62-55 victory.

Moore was the Blazers’ only bright spot throughout the slog. The Conference USA Preseason Player of the Year led UAB in scoring, at one point sparking an 18-6 Blazer run, while turning the ball over just once. He also set the tone on the other end of the court: hampered by Moore’s tenacious interior defense, the Racers shot just 34.3% from inside the arc.

Seemingly able to block shots at will, Moore’s triple-double attempt felt like it had a better chance of success than did Johnson’s, but he simply ran out of time, unable to accomplish the feat in his 37 minutes on the floor.

Jordan Swing vs. Tulane — Feb. 27th, 2013

Stats: 23 points, 9 assists, and 10 rebounds

This is it: the closest a UAB player has come to a triple-double since 2009. If Johnson and Moore were inches away from matching Delaney’s achievement, Jordan Swing was centimeters, falling just one assist shy of history. The Birmingham native was tremendous on what would prove to be the finest afternoon of his career, shooting 75% from inside the arc and 80% from beyond it. Swing and teammate Rod Rucker combined to make 22 of their 29 field goal attempts.

The Blazers needed every ounce of Swing’s brilliance, and Jerod Haase knew it, keeping the forward on the court from the opening tip to the final whistle. When Tulane went on a late 23-4 run to put UAB on the ropes, Swing nailed two clutch three-pointers, all but sealing the victory for the Green and Gold.

“Credit UAB tonight. They hit some really big shots once we took that lead," Tulane head coach Ed Conroy said. "Jordan Swing and Rod Rucker were tremendous tonight and combined for almost 50 points and hit some daggers late. We game planned for them and we knew how good they were and they carried their team tonight."

By Game Score, Swing’s performance in this game is one of the 30 greatest by a UAB player since 2004. It’s downright cruel he couldn’t have found one more assist.

Rod Rucker vs. New Mexico — Nov. 21st, 2013

Stats: 18 points, 7 assists and 20 rebounds

Rod Rucker’s statline against New Mexico stands as one of the strangest in UAB basketball history: 22 field goal attempts, 3 baskets made. He went 0-1 from beyond the arc and 3-21 from inside it. Six other Blazers have attempted 21 or more two-pointers in a game since 2004, but all of them connected on at least seven shots. The only comparable display of volume and inefficiency by a UAB player in Sports-Reference’s database is Steve Mitchell’s 3-21 shooting performance in the 1986 NCAA Tournament against North Carolina.

Nevertheless, Rucker nearly lifted UAB over a ranked Lobos team in the quarterfinals of the Charleston Classic MTE, sinking 12 of 13 free throws and grabbing 11 more rebounds than any other Blazer. This attempt falls in the vein of Johnson’s for several reasons: Rucker played an immense 48 minutes, he probably wasn’t truly within striking distance of a triple-double (averaging just one assist per 6.8 minutes), and the game itself deserves an article of its own. In a double-overtime thriller, New Mexico pulled out a win after hitting last-second three-pointers at the end of every period.

Rucker deserves a strength of schedule commendation: the Lobos were ranked 20th in KenPom at the time of tipoff, higher than any other opponent on this list.

The entirety of this game is on YouTube for your viewing pleasure.

William Lee vs. MTSU — February 28th, 2015

Stats: 16 points, 8 blocks and 11 rebounds

For the first half of the 2010s, Blazer triple-double bids came in two-year intervals, a pattern that continued in 2015 when William Lee rode a minute count bolstered by three overtimes (sounds familiar) to one of the greatest defensive statlines in school history. Over a year before he would be christened the “Mayor of Blockingham,” Haha turned in a performance worthy of the office, swatting eight shots and ripping down 11 defensive rebounds.

The visiting MTSU Blue Raiders, not yet formed into a juggernaut, nonetheless displayed characteristics of the machine they’d later become. Kermit Davis’ squad was down 12 at halftime but staged several spirited comebacks, only running out of steam at the end of the final overtime. The marathon forced Robert Brown to play 50 minutes and Hakeem Baxter and Lee to play 45.

"You just get mentally tired, but must fight the fatigue," said Lee. "That is why Coach runs us at practice so we can prepare for games like this."

"I don't think anybody cares about how tired I am," a smiling Jerod Haase said when asked how he felt after the game. "But it was funny because all the coaches felt like we played out there today. I think the guys that played 50 minutes are probably really tired. I decided I'll give them the day off tomorrow. I was working hard, the assistant coaches were working hard, the managers were working hard, the trainers, everybody was working hard.”

Lee was certainly exhausted, lying down in the locker room for several minutes before making his way to media availability. As the closest UAB player to a triple-double since Swing two years prior, the rest Lee took was well-deserved. No Blazer would block eight shots in a game again until…

William Lee vs. FAU — February 7th, 2016

Stats: 10 points, 8 blocks and 10 rebounds

Let’s set the stage. It’s February 7th, 2016. The 20-4 Blazers, just weeks away from clinching their fourth Conference USA regular season title, are playing host to the KenPom #282 Florida Atlantic Owls. UAB is already a massive favorite, but FAU leading scorer Adonis Filer is a late scratch with concussion-like symptoms, further accentuating the Owls’ talent disadvantage. After a competitive opening ten minutes, the Blazers begin to predictably drop the hammer, going on a 22-5 run that takes them into halftime. By the end of this stretch, William Lee has rejected eight FAU shots.

That’s right — Lee replicated his 2015 feat in twenty minutes, entering the locker room with eight blocks, seven points, and seven rebounds. He wasn’t just on triple-double pace, he was on school record pace, with the potential to post a more impressive statline than either Delaney or Ogg.

Unfortunately, the Blazers took their collective feet off the gas in the interest of sportsmanship as their lead ballooned to over 40. As FAU grew warier and warier of driving inside, Lee’s services were no longer needed, and he ended up playing just 22 minutes on the night. He didn’t record a block in the second half.

For what it’s worth, Lee didn’t seem that torn up about it. According to AL.com, he:

Said he wasn't that aware he was close to a triple double until UAB staffer D.J. Black said, "you need two."

"I guess he meant blocks," Lee said. "They just stopped coming in there (in the second half)."

Highlights from this game are available on YouTube.

Yaxel Lendeborg vs. UTSA — January 2nd, 2024

Stats: 23 points, 15 rebounds and 7 blocks

Best remembered for Butta Johnson’s contested buzzer-beater, UAB’s inaugural AAC game also marked the first time in eight seasons a Blazer came within three points, assists, rebounds, blocks, or steals of a triple-double. Several greats of the Ehsan and Kennedy eras came within four or five, including Jordan Walker, Eric Gaines, Tavin Lovan, Nick Norton, and Deion Lavender (?), but Yaxel Lendeborg one-upped them all with his performance against UTSA. It turns out the Prairie View game wasn’t even the closest he’s been to a triple-double in the last calendar year.

Lendeborg had shown flashes of greatness in the buildup to UAB’s conference opener, but this was the first time he showed off the full spectrum of his versatile skillset. Shutout from inside the arc for what is still one of just three times in his career, Yaxel expanded his range, attempting six three-pointers and making five of them. Pair that with 8/8 free-throw shooting, dominant interior defense, and 15 rebounds, and you have a recipe for success.

“Are you kidding me? I don’t think he’s ever made five in practice,” Andy Kennedy said of Lendeborg. “I don’t think he’s made five since I met him, but he made them tonight. We need him. There’s room for growth and he knows it.”

Per Game Score, this is the second-greatest performance of Lendeborg’s career to date. The cherry on top? A perfect screen leading to Johnson’s aforementioned game-winner.

Lendeborg is the Blazer with the most potential to usurp Delaney since Lee graduated in 2018; he could get there with blocks, as he demonstrated against UTSA, or he could get there with assists, as he demonstrated against Prairie View. We could see history made over the next four months.

11/4/24 vs. Vermont - projected Q3 game

The Vermont Catamounts will face the Blazers in Birmingham on college basketball’s opening night, marking the programs’ first-ever meeting.

UAB hasn’t faced many challenging opening opponents over the last decade, having almost exclusively taken on teams sub-170th in KenPom. That trend has now been emphatically bucked, with mid-major powerhouses visiting Bartow in each of the last two seasons.

UVM, an America East juggernaut, has tallied 18 consecutive winning seasons and is coming off of a 28-win campaign that ended in an NCAA Tournament loss to Duke. The Catamounts return five of the top seven contributors from that team, including dominant rim defender Ileri Ayo-Faleye and all-conference guards Shamir Bogues and TJ Long. Vermont also added talented Howard transfer Shy Odom, making it exceedingly likely they’ll again be the class of the AE.

The Catamounts were KenPom’s 104th-ranked team last season, and early BartTorvik projections expect Vermont to repeat that performance. The revamped Blazer roster will be tested from the season’s opening whistle.

11/7/24 vs. Southern Miss - projected Q4 game

Three days later, UAB will host Southern Miss in a rematch of a 2023 game the Golden Eagles won in excruciating fashion.

BartTorvik pegs the Blazers as an early 15.5-point favorite and gives UAB a 91% chance to win.

Perhaps the country’s most mercurial program over the last three seasons, USM suffering through a 7-26 campaign in 2022, won the Sun Belt in 2023, and cratered to 243rd in KenPom last year. They return enigmatic guard Andre Curbelo, who missed much of 2023 with eligibility and injury issues, but otherwise lose nearly all of the best players from a team that was an also-ran in a weak Sun Belt. The Golden Eagles brought in a respectable transfer class, but should again hover around mediocrity.

Southern Miss handed UAB their sole non-conference Q4 loss last season and will be an equally dangerous landmine to dodge in 2024.

11/10/24 vs. SELA - projected Q4 game

UAB will face another Q4 opponent on Sunday, November 10th, hosting a buy game against Southeastern Louisiana.

BartTorvik pegs the Blazers as an early 17.7-point favorite and gives UAB a 94% chance to win.

SELA will likely be worse than Southern Miss — they finished 5th in a terrible Southland last season while recording a KenPom ranking of 306th. The Lions’ incoming transfer class is solid, but UAB must win this game.

11/15/24 at High Point - projected Q2 game

The recently-announced home-and-home between UAB and High Point will provide the Blazers another opportunity to go face-to-face with a conference champion.

Loaded with NIL money and talent, the Panthers are positioned to be the nation’s strongest low-major for the foreseeable future. They fielded one of the best teams in Big South history last season, putting three players on the all-conference first team and finishing in the KenPom top 115.

After falling to Longwood in the conference finals, High Point reloaded with a stellar transfer class that includes East Carolina’s Bobby Pettiford, formerly a high four-star recruit. The Panthers also brought back star guard Kezza Giffa, fringe NBA prospect Kimani Hamilton, and monstrous center Juslin Bodo Bodo.

The High Point game is currently the gem of the Blazers’ non-conference schedule: it’s a true road game, so it could become a Q1 matchup if the Panthers rise high enough in the NET.

11/22/24 through 11/25/24 at Paradise Jam

BartTorvik projects the Paradise Jam field as follows:

• Kansas State - Q1

• McNeese - Q2

• George Washington - Q3

• Liberty - Q3

• Louisiana - Q3

• Illinois State - Q3

• Longwood - Q4

The Blazers open the MTE against Longwood, a team that made the NCAA Tournament last season but loses nearly all of their production. The Lancers brought in Tennessee transfer DJ Jefferson and Drake transfer Colby Garland, and it’s hard to predict whether they’ll be a Q3 opponent or a Q4 opponent.

Hypothetical late-round matchups against Kansas State and McNeese, almost guaranteed to be Q1 and Q2 games, respectively, would boost UAB’s resume greatly.

12/1/24 vs. MTSU - projected Q4 game

12/15/24 vs. Arkansas St. - projected Q3 game

?/?/24 at Drake - projected Q2 game

Upon returning from the Virgin Islands, UAB will play out the second legs of three home-and-home deals they signed last summer.

First up will be Middle Tennessee; unfortunately for the Blazers, the Blue Raiders are a much less appealing opponent than they were a year ago. After a fantastic 2022 and a solid 2023, MTSU was expected to assume the Conference USA throne after the departures of UAB and FAU, but Nick McDevitt’s group collapsed to a nightmarish 282nd-place KenPom finish last season.

There’s a modicum of hope in Murfreesboro, and the Blue Raiders will probably be better than Southern Miss and SELA — MTSU returns star guard Jestin Porter and brings in a big transfer class — but this will be a Q4 matchup barring a major surprise.

BartTorvik pegs the Blazers as an early 12.7-point favorite and gives UAB an 88% chance to win.

Arkansas State, who throttled UAB in Jonesboro last season, is a program on the opposite trajectory. The Red Wolves enjoyed one of their best campaigns of the century in 2023 and brought in several down transfers to bolster a roster that returns most of its best players. A-State will be one of the Blazers’ most difficult non-conference challenges and are projected by some computer systems to be just as good as Vermont.

UAB’s return game at Drake expected to be played this season, although no date is yet confirmed. The Bulldogs were decimated by the transfer portal and the departure of coach Darian DeVries over the offseason, but brought in the talented duo of Kael Combs and Cam Manyawu from Wyoming and imported several players from DII Northwest Missouri State, the former home of new coach Ben McCollum.

BartTorvik rates Drake highly and pegs the game as a complete tossup.

The Blazers have a maximum of three non-conference games left to announce. One of them will likely be filled by a team like Rhodes or Montevallo; UAB has played a non-Division 1 game in every season since 2012.

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UTSA Roadrunners

2023-2024: 11-21, 5-13, T-14 American, 254th in KenPom

Steve Henson’s up-tempo, run-and-gun style of basketball finally ran its course last year, as a one-dimensional offense and a cripplingly bad defense staked the Roadrunners to a 5-13 conference record, good for last place in the American. The longtime UTSA coach’s contract was not renewed at the conclusion of the 2023-2024 season.

Despite fielding some of the more aesthetically appealing mid-major teams of the last decade, UTSA failed to find consistency or postseason success during Henson’s eight years at the helm. The halcyon days of the Jhivvan Jackson/Keaton Wallace era produced the program’s first top-150 KenPom finish in 2019, but a first-round conference tournament loss brought the season to an abrupt end. The Roadrunners never truly recovered from the 2021 departures of their backcourt stars — by the following year, UTSA would freefall to a sub-300 KenPom ranking.

Wayward son Jordan Ivy-Curry transferred home from Pacific last summer and helped the program recover some of its identity. In their inaugural season in the American, UTSA recorded their highest tempo ranking since 2021, put a scare into several of the league’s elite teams, and improved by nearly 25 KenPom spots from 2023. They also claimed victories against in-state rivals Lamar and Incarnate Word. However, a historically inefficient defense turned most conference games into gunfights the Roadrunners didn’t have the firepower to win. Goodwill built up during a late-season winning streak was washed away by a first-round tournament loss to Temple.

Similar to fired counterpart Scott Pera, formerly of Rice, Henson made lemons into lemonade at a school often reluctant to invest in basketball. The early Jackson/Wallace years produced some of the best and most watchable teams in program history; there was, at one point, a general consensus among Conference USA nerds that Henson was one of the more underrated coaches in the mid-major landscape.

But the state of the program has been unambiguously awful since 2021. Not all of that can be pinned on Henson — UTSA has suffered crippling portal attrition in recent years, a fact which probably speaks to the program’s reported lack of NIL and the school’s underwhelming basketball infrastructure — but it would’ve been baffling if AD Lisa Campos retained him.

This brings us to…

Austin Claunch.

UTSA’s hiring of Austin Claunch fits the mold of their 2006 hiring of Brooks Thompson — a mid-30s, up-and-coming power school assistant looking to revitalize a program in desperate need of a shot in the arm.

Claunch served on Nate Oats’ staff at Alabama this past season, helping the Tide build their formidable offense into KenPom’s second-ranked unit as they rumbled to the Final Four. Prior to his brief stop in Tuscaloosa, Claunch was the head coach at Nicholls State of the Southland, a job he took when he was just 28 years old. The Colonels boasted a 90-61 record over Claunch’s five seasons in Thibodaux and made the NIT for the first time in program history.

Claunch is not only the best American hire of the offseason, but one of the conference’s best hires of the last several years. He’s from Houston, just a few hours east of San Antonio. He’s suffered one losing season in his eight years on the sidelines. He won multiple conference titles at Nicholls, one of the most cash-strapped programs in Division 1 (Claunch was on a higher annual salary as an Alabama assistant than he was as the Nicholls head coach).

At a time when the Roadrunners are desperate for a rejuvenation, the 34-year-old Claunch is well-known for his energy — he’s been described by Nate Oats as a “tireless recruiter” and “one of the hardest working guys in the business.”

The UTSA administration, which recently announced plans for a $35 million basketball practice facility to be completed by 2026, has finally begun to address the program’s glaring material needs; however, with the team floundering at the bottom of the standings, a well-handled leadership transition was critical. Steve Henson’s dismissal was a step in the right direction, but sticking the landing is always the hard part, and UTSA did so with aplomb. On paper, it’s difficult to draw up a more suitable candidate than Claunch.

Although the Roadrunners’ budget constraints are still apparent — according to Greg Luca of the San Antonio Express-News, Claunch will be on the same $550,000 annual salary as Steve Henson was, making him the lowest-paid coach in the American — UTSA’s blueprint for success is much less vague than it was just six months ago.

That’s not to say Claunch is going to lead the Roadrunners to immediate victory. Next season’s outlook is murky at best; among other obstacles, UTSA lost their entire 2023-2024 core to the transfer portal. Let’s take a look at…

The roster.

UTSA will field the most unrecognizable group of players in the conference next season, rivaled only by Rice. Nearly every Roadrunner that saw playing time in 2023-2024 departed after Henson’s firing, leading Claunch and his staff to bring in a transfer class numbering double-digits.

RETURNERS

Nazar Mahmoud, G

As of right now, Mahmoud is the only player from last year’s UTSA team committed to returning. A three-star recruit coming out of high school in 2023, Mahmoud spent his freshman season on the bench behind Jordan Ivy-Curry. He’s played just 78 minutes in his brief career.

TRANSFERS

Primo Spears, Florida State G

The concept of a “winning player” is probably a little antiquated at this point, but it’s hard to ignore Spears’ track record. The senior guard began his career at Duquesne, spent 2023 at Georgetown, and migrated to Florida State last year. He ‘lead’ both Duquesne and Georgetown to sub-215 KenPom rankings before suffering a career-worst season on a mediocre Seminoles team, seeing huge usage rates at each stop. His career winning percentage? 31.5%.

Spears is an effective playmaker and ball-handler when things are going well; his quick first step allows him to be disruptive inside the arc. However, he’s a bad three-point shooter and a subpar defender, although he does consistently average over 1 steal per game. Spears feeds on a shot diet that includes plenty of midrange jumpers, one of the reasons his eFG% was an ugly 42.6 last season.

On paper, the drop in competition should do him well, but he’s a shot-chucker in a Roadrunner backcourt with a lot of mouths to feed. This could go either way.

Tai’Reon Joseph, Southern G

Joseph is another high-usage guard with a shaky history of winning. In his career, he’s played for three sub-215 KenPom teams and a community college. UTSA will be his fifth school in five years.

Last season at Southern, Joseph averaged 20.5 points per game while taking 40% of the Jaguars’ shots, an unfathomable rate that led the nation. He wasn’t particularly efficient, although it’s hard to judge his efficiency numbers on a rate of nearly 18 field goals per game. Joseph missed the team’s last month of play due to injury and Southern’s offense got noticeably worse.

The 6’3″, 175-pound Joseph won’t provide much in the way of defense, but the offensive upside is very apparent. Last season, he put up an efficient 22 points in a loss to Arizona, an efficient 23 in a loss to Tulane, and an efficient 27 in a win over Mississippi State. Claunch isn’t going to let him take 9 threes a game on 30% shooting again, though. The fit with Spears will be interesting.

Marcus Millender, South Alabama G

If you can believe it, Millender is another offensively-focused guard, although mercifully he’s in a far different mold from Spears and Joseph. As USA’s primary pick-and-roll ballhandler, Millender recorded an assist rate of 23.3%, a top-ten mark in the Sun Belt, while keeping his turnover rate at a manageable 19.7%. He also made 47% of his threes last season (albeit on low volume) and ranked in the 82nd percentile of D1 jump shooters, per Synergy.

At 5’11”, Millender isn’t much of a defender — his USA teammates used to call him “Smurf” — but he’s a connective offensive piece that profiles as more of a true point guard than Spears or Joseph. Millender also has three years of eligibility remaining.

Can’t really see this one busting. One of Claunch’s best gets of the class.

Paul Lewis, Vanderbilt G

In two years at Vanderbilt, Lewis averaged less than 15 minutes per game. He’s rarely gotten to the rim in his brief college career. He has a little bit of shooting pedigree, although his three-point percentage cratered to 23.1% last season. Doesn’t project as a particularly good defender at 6’2″, 175 pounds. Transferring down a level seems like the right call.

A fine, if unspectacular, pickup. I think Lewis is better than his numbers indicate, but UTSA still has a bit of a project on their hands.

Sky Wicks, Incarnate Word wing

Another high-usage guy with questionable efficiency numbers and high scoring upside. Wicks took 30.2% of Incarnate Word’s shots last season, a top-85 rate in the country. He’s less of a midrange scorer than Spears or Joseph, doing most of his damage from beyond the arc or at the rim. Wicks put up some real stinkers down the stretch, but also scored an efficient 26 points on the road against Texas and recorded 24 points against this very same UTSA team.

At 6’6″, Wicks has a little more defensive upside than Spears or Joseph, but I still wouldn’t classify him as a positive on that end.

Raekwon Horton, James Madison wing

Horton is a winner. He spent the first two seasons of his career at Pat Kelsey’s Charleston, where he contributed to a record-setting 31-4 campaign. He transferred to James Madison, won 32 more games, and left after Mark Byington’s departure.

Horton is a veteran wing with consistently outstanding defensive numbers — he boasted a 3.5% steal rate last season, ranking in the nation’s top 85 — and impressive offensive rebounding statistics. He’s not a very high-usage offensive guy, but can make a three when called upon and is an obscenely efficient interior scorer.

Horton is just what a rebuilding team like UTSA needs on the wing. Good get.

Jesus Carralero, Missouri wing (?)

Carralero is a weird player. Entering his sixth year of college basketball, he only has one good full season under his belt (2022 at Campbell). He’s a fantastic defender, a solid rebounder, and a great passer from the elbow, à la Aly Khalifa. However, Carralero is a non-shooter and doesn’t have a clear positional fit. He could use another inch or two on his 6’8″ frame. He was ineffective at Missouri last season, but everyone was ineffective at Missouri last season.

An interesting acquisition. Interested to see how Claunch utilizes him.

Jonnivius Smith, Buffalo F

I’d usually be skeptical of the decision to take a role player from a 4-27 MAC team, but Smith was obviously not the problem at Buffalo last season. In 2023-2024, he sported offensive and defensive rebounding rates that both ranked top-60 in the country, recorded a block rate of 4.3%, made nearly 60% of his two-pointers, made nearly 40% of his three-pointers (on extremely limited volume), and was far-and-away Buffalo’s best player by every advanced metric you can find. At 6’9″, 200 pounds, Smith has an AAC frame and an AAC skillset. Should be a productive pickup.

JaQuan Scott, Mississippi State F

The 6’8″, 230-pound Scott was one of the nation’s highest-rated JUCO prospects in 2023, coming in two spots behind Alejandro Vasquez (his teammate at Salt Lake City CC) and three spots ahead of Yaxel Lendeborg. He rarely saw the floor in his one season at Mississippi State, but as UAB fans have seen firsthand, JUCO players can find plenty of success at the American level. Not a bad guy to take a flyer on.

David Hermés, Indian Hills (JUCO) F

Hermés is an interesting player. The 6’10” forward, a member of the Syrian national team, is very mobile for his size, can play on the perimeter, and can shoot the three. He received very little hype as a prospect, but Hermes is a gamble who immediately becomes UTSA’s largest body.

TL;DR

There’s scoring upside here, but Primo Spears has been one of the country’s least efficient players for the last several seasons and Tai’Reon Joseph is an up-transfer from America’s worst conference. Neither have displayed the ability to effectively shoot three-pointers and both subsist on a shot diet that would make Mike D’Antoni cry. In fact, no one on the team has demonstrated the ability to knock down threes at a high clip. The 2024-2025 Roadrunners will likely push a fast tempo and score plenty of points, but it will be shocking if they’re efficient.

The backcourt could also be the worst defensive group in the league. Neither Spears nor Joseph are great defenders, Marcus Millender is 5’11”, and Paul Lewis is similarly limited by his height. There’s more defensive talent in the frontcourt and the wing — UTSA might not field a bottom-20 unit in the nation again — but it seems as though the Roadrunners are going to find themselves in gunfights more often than not.

I’ve convinced myself the roster is better than last season’s, and I think it’s reasonable to pick UTSA over Rice in the conference right now, but this is probably not a team that’s going to make a whole lot of noise. By my count, they do have a few scholarships left to offer, which is something to keep an eye on.

Either way, UTSA has pushed the right buttons over the last few months. Henson’s dismissal and Claunch’s hiring were both correct decisions. The flawed yet intriguing roster may not lead the Roadrunners to immediate success, but the program seems to be making tangible forward progress, something that hasn’t been true in several years.

2023-2024: 11-21, 5-13, T-14 American, 229th in KenPom

Head coach Scott Pera’s seven-year tenure in Houston came to an end last season after the bottom dropped out of his usually-steady program. An offense that suffered significant shooting regression, a shallow rotation, a lineup that stood as the least athletic in the American, and a typically anemic defense combined to produce a conference record of 5-13, the Owls’ worst mark since 2018.

The Owls cleaned up against the dregs of D1, recording resounding victories over UIW, Northwestern State, and Houston Christian, but were often non-competitive against their mid-major peers. November saw them suffer a five-game losing streak that was punctuated by an absolute beatdown (75-39) at the hands of crosstown rival Houston. Rice briefly reached .500 with a December 20 win over Prairie View A&M, but another five-game losing streak brought the Owls back down to earth as they entered conference play.

The talented core of Travis Evee, Max Fiedler, and Mekhi Mason produced a handful of high points — an overtime loss to Charlotte, a road win against Memphis, a 23-point road thrashing of UAB — but by late January, the Owls had been relegated to an afterthought. Rice finished in a tie for last place in their inaugural American season.

Rice University is an extraordinarily difficult place to win basketball games, and Pera did a respectable job of it — since 1965, he’s one of just three Rice head coaches to lead the program to multiple winning seasons. His high-octane, shooting-oriented style made the Owls a constant upset threat in Conference USA and bought the program some goodwill with fans; before his arrival, Rice spent most of the 2000s playing a brand of basketball that was both tedious and unsuccessful.

But to retain Pera would’ve been equivalent to spinning tires in the mud. Program anchors Fiedler and Evee have graduated. Promising underclassman Mason has transferred. Rice, a program with the worst facilities and smallest alumni base in the American, simply had to show a sign of life this offseason in order to survive.

That brings us to…

Head coach Rob Lanier.

The hire of Lanier, a relatively high-profile name who began his head coaching career in 2001, marks a departure from Rice’s 2010s philosophy of targeting younger, up-and coming assistants with no previous head coaching experience.

Lanier, of course, was fired by SMU earlier this year after the Mustangs dropped their regular season finale at UAB, a loss which cost them a bye in the American tournament. SMU went on to hire Andy Enfield from USC, who went on to hire Eric Musselman from Arkansas, who went on to hire John Calipari from Kentucky, who went on to hire Mark Pope from BYU…

All this to remind readers that the UAB Blazers set off the wildest coaching search in recent college basketball history. Thank you, Eric Gaines.

On the matter at hand, Lanier, who three months ago was leading an intra-conference rival to a 20-win season while on a $2 million dollar annual salary, is certainly one of the splashier hires in Rice history. He has plenty of pedigree, having served on the staffs of Rick Barnes and Billy Donovan, and is highly spoken of by both men. He was good, not spectacular, at Georgia State, and accumulated plenty of talent at SMU but wasn’t given enough time to capitalize on it. He’s known as an ace recruiter; during the 2010s, he secured the commitments of several Tennessee program icons. My personal assessment of Lanier as a coach is decent-to-good.

Lanier’s hire indicates that Rice is making an effort to at least stay afloat in the American, and I believe he’s a step in the right direction. It would be silly to pretend that he’s going to assemble the same level of talent at academically rigorous Rice as he did at uber-wealthy SMU, but Lanier has experience building capable rosters at similarly-budgeted Georgia State. To be fair, GSU doesn’t have to overcome the obstacle of an 8% admissions rate.

Lanier’s staff is the same as it was at SMU — Chris Kreider as the associate head coach and Josten Crow and Andre Owens as assistant coaches.

That brings us to…

The roster.

There is hardly a remaining trace of the 2023-2024 Rice Owls. Of players that saw more than 10% of the team’s minutes, only fifth-year sharpshooter Alem Huseinovic and junior big man Andrew Akuchie return. Lanier and company have been tasked with rebuilding an entire roster — they’ve brought in ten players so far.

• Jalen Smith, G

  • Smith is an established American player, spending three seasons at SMU before following Rob Lanier to Rice this offseason. He’s primarily a spot-up shooter who made 38% of his threes last season on middling volume. He’s a solid ballhandler, and metrics rate him as a minus defender. An OK overall acquisition.

• Denver Anglin, G

  • Anglin is a former four-star recruit that originally committed to Patrick Ewing’s Georgetown. He suffered through an unsightly 2022 before transferring to Lanier’s SMU last year, where he redshirted due to injury. Entering his second season of eligibility, Anglin is an intriguing talent, but almost a complete unknown.

• Emory Lanier, G

  • The son of Rob, Emory is at the tail end of a long college career that began at Davidson before taking him to SMU. He’s a respectable spot-up shooter and that’s about it. Will not see an abundance of playing time.

• Trae Broadnax, G

  • Broadnax, making the jump from USC Upstate of the Big South, will probably be Rice’s primary ballhandler next season. Some up-transfers struggle with the physicality of their new league, but Broadnax is a well-built 6’4″, 200 pounds. He’s not a fantastic shooter, but draws fouls at a high rate and sports respectable passing numbers. Likely the most impactful addition we’ve covered so far.

• PJ Carter, G

  • Carter, a transfer from in-state rival UTSA, was a substantial contributor in the AAC last season. He’s a great spot-up shooter (40.3% from three last year, 80th percentile in Synergy spot-up shooting), a fine ballhandler, and a solid defender. At 6’5″, 175 pounds, Carter is also well-built. A good pickup.

• Aaron Powell, G

  • Powell, a scoring-oriented combo guard out of Los Angeles, is the only true freshman in this recruiting class. A borderline four-star recruit formerly committed to Cal Poly, Powell immediately becomes one of the highest-rated signees in Rice history. He’ll certainly have the opportunity to compete for playing time.

• Jimmy Oladokun, F

  • Oladokun, at 6’9″, 220 pounds, is almost completely paint-bound offensively. Horrific free-throw shooter. Decent rebounder. An OK, not elite, defender for his size. Three years of eligibility, though, and certainly has the attributes to develop into a contributor.

• Trey Patterson, F

  • Patterson spent the last four seasons at Villanova, where he was consistently injured and struggled to see consistent playing time behind NBA players like Jermaine Samuels. At 6’9″, he has the physical attributes to excel in the American. Patterson was a highly-touted recruit out of high school; although he never displayed it for the Wildcats, he was a good shooter for his size. Patterson has two years of eligibility remaining. Keep an eye on this get — an intriguing reclamation project.

• Caden Powell, F

  • Powell is a transfer from Wyoming that’s an offensive minus — 48.6% from two, 68.2% from the free throw line last season — but at 6’11”, 220 pounds, he projects as one of Rice’s best frontcourt defenders of the last several years. Powell sported an above-average 4% block rate in 2023-2024. This acquisition helps shrink the size/athleticism deficit the Owls were constantly faced with last season.

• Kellen Amos, F

  • Skeptical of this one. Amos, a transfer from Central Connecticut formerly of Binghamton, has only ever played in the NEC and America East. He has size (6’7″, 190 pounds) and sports a high block rate, but is an inefficient scorer and shot just 28.1% from beyond the arc last season. Amos was just OK at the low-major level – doubtful he’ll be able to make the jump to American play. He could use a year or two of acclimation, but he’s entering his final year of eligibility.

Rice’s incoming class is fine. There are some players I like (Broadnax, Carter, C. Powell), some reclamation projects I’m excited about (Patterson), some players I’m skeptical of (Amos, Anglin), some role players who are known quantities (Smith, Lanier), and some players I don’t know how to feel about (A. Powell, Oladokun).

The Owls have gotten bigger at all positions and have added some more shot blocking, and Rice could certainly be one of the conference’s better spot-up shooting teams next season. However, I’m skeptical of the backcourt — although I like them both, Trae Broadnax and PJ Carter are transfers from a Big South team and the worst team in the American, respectively — and the frontcourt looks like it could be painfully static on offense.

As summer workouts begin, Rice is in a familiar spot. If all goes well, the Owls could compete for a single bye at the conference tournament. If all goes poorly, the Owls could stand as the American’s worst team. Such is the life of a team with ten new players. However, it’s hard to paint this offseason as anything but positive for the program. Lanier probably won’t start winning in year one — he might not start winning ever — but his hiring shows Rice isn’t content to roll over.