More than doubled the spread? I'll take it. Here's my game recap...
Great win over a decent low major opponent. North Florida was coming off a strong performance against #11 FSU, trailing by only 7 at the half and by 10 with 6 minutes to play before losing by 14. 95-81. They also played Dayton, Minnesota and Penn State very tough. We needed to confidence booster to finish off OOC play and we did that in an emphatic manner.
As great as it is to score 95 points, I was most impressed by our defense. To hold a team under 50 points that just dropped 81 in Tallahassee is very impressive. North Florida has not scored below 66 points this season prior to this game. An Auburn record 33 turnovers forced is fantastic. Our guys were playing with high intensity on D the entire way which is a mark of a very focused, well coached team. Bruce was very
Great game for Bryce. He played pretty well while sick against Murray State, but today he was all the way back where he was before he hit a 2 game slump. 18 points on 5/10 shooting from 3 is vintage Bryce. He also added 4 assists and 2 steals to round out a great performance.
Another nice game for Austin. 13 points and 7 boards is fantastic. My only gripe right now is that Austin is scoring at an extremely high rate when he gets a good feed in the post and he is not getting as many looks there as he needs, imo. Austin is our best offensive weapon because he does not need to be hot shooting to get points. I hope we use this lay off before SEC play to work on our post feeds. We are going to need big Austin to carry us at times on the road.
Nice game for Chuma. 12 points, 2 assists, 5 boards and most impressively, 5 steals. Chuma is ready to be a bigger scorer for us and we will need him to do that, especially on the road.
Harper with another 10 assist effort. Only 9 points, but I will take our chances to win any game when Harper has 10 assists to 2 turnovers. When he plays like that, our entire offense is clicking and our other scorers are getting the job done.
Now its time to start our SEC title defense. Early schedule sets up nicely. @Miss, UGA, @Tamu are all games we can win if we play reasonably well. Ole Miss is probably the toughest game of the three and their crowd will be fired up for the SEC opener. UGA is trash and Tamu lost at home to Texas Southern today. Get those 3 Ws and lets go into the showdown at home with UK ranked in the 10.