TTech women's crowds may number less than a thousand these days, consistently--the program is at an all time low. Some games even just hundreds. Same for their men. And, in the spacious United Areana it's easier to hear one or two individual hecklers than it is when the place used to be packed with 10,000.
Believe it or not there are still ghosts of Griner/Barncastle slugfest out there. It only takes one or two jerks to pick on a new player and ask, "Hey do you ________ like Griner did?" to get to a young player. Sad, sad. Their worst fan they banned two years ago who had season seats right at the base of one of the goal posts and he was notorious for doing research and going after players' soft spots.
I'm not sure that happened the other night as much as we just are in the middle of a long grind and TTech DOES have some gritty new players and two players who will shoot the three from the scorer's table if you don't guard them so our legs had to hustle that much further out to defend in our man defense.
No real excuses. Just basically an off night that stunk up the place. But that happens, and as good as Niya was in 17 assists-0 turnovers a week ago, she turned it over in Lubbock, and the Achilles heel of Nina is that if she gets down on herself, she can go in to a funk--not a sulk, just a "I better not shoot the ball because I've started badly" kind of funk. Soph insecurity. She's the team leader by example but the quietest person on the team.
Look for better stats Saturday at our place vs. TCU when we can clinch outright.
I'm still not convinced this is a final four team simply unless we get awfully lucking in the seeding, but up until last night I would have told you we are nipping at the heals of becoming a Louisville kind of team that can beat a #1 seed and slip in to Tampa Bay unexpectedly as they did to us two years ago.