Auburn Report Card by 001

This game was hard to write a report card because you found yourself applauding them one minute and cussing them the next. The game was ragged with mistakes on both sides of the competition. State did an excellent job in most categories with two exceptions. They became lax and had 24 turnovers. Eight of these by Gordon. However, he wiped this out scoring 24 points, passing out eight assists and pulling down a team high of eighteen rebounds. But the free throw shooting that we have been fussing about improved dramatically. We were 23 of 26 for 88.5%. By far our best FT shooting over the previous three or four years. The final outcome, 83 to 64 improved us to 16-7 overall and 7-2 in SEC play. This kept us in the lead of the SEC West. And our next game is with Arkansas , presently in second place in the SEC West.
OFFENSE B+
I would have given us an A in this category except for two aspects of the game. Turnovers (24) and offensive rebounds (12 vs. 14 for Auburn ). As outmanned as Auburn was in this game, we should never have allowed them to pull down more offensive rebounds than we did. But our shooting in this game was great. We knocked down 25 of 48 attempts for 52.1%. That type of shooting will win you a lot of games. We also went 10 of 23 on 3 pointers for 43.5%. And then made 23 of 26 attempts from the charity stripe for 88>5%. I just hope this type of shooting holds up over the next 3 or 4 weeks as we move towards the end of the regular season. Our starters ended up with 76 of our 83 points. I will say that I was a little disappointed that Coach Stansbury didn’t give our bench more playing time in this game.
DEFENSE A
What can I say? Although Auburn was outmanned from the get go, we did do a number on them. Our guys held them to 23 of 68 attempts for 33.8%. This is two to three percentages points better than our average. We also pulled down 34 defensive rebounds to their total rebounds of 27. We held them to just 6 of 25 attempts on 3 pointers which equates to 24.0%. Kudos to Jarvis Varnado for his 6 blocks which set a new season’s record for State, eclipsing Erick Dampier’s record of 106. Jarvis now has 111 swats for the year. We also had 6 steals in this event. I think the intimidation factor of our big men, especially Varnado and Rhodes played a large part in our defense in this game.
ASSIST TO TURNOVER RATIO D
Before writing this, I had considered giving this category an F. But that would probably been a bit harsh. Fourteen assists to 24 turnovers will lose a lot of games down the road. Auburn ’s mid-court double teams on Gordon should never have happened if Jamont had kept his mind in the game as long as his body was in there. Stewart also had some lapses in that he had four turnovers to go with just one assist. This category has to improve and improve constantly down the schedule.
REBOUNDING B+
Although we out rebounded Auburn 46 to 27, we still could not top them in offensive rebounds. They had 14 to our 12. With out big men playing down low, this should never have happened. Conversely, we did have 34 defensive rebounds to their total 27 rebounds.
3 POINT SHOOTING A
It’s nice to have Hansbrough back with his 3 point shot. We made 10 of 23 attempts for 43.5% from behind the arc. This type of 3 point shooting can win you a lot of games. We were 4 of 10 in the first half and 6 of 13 in the second half.
FREE THROW SHOOTING A
This is a grade that I never thought I would possibly give this team this year based on what they have done in the past. They went 23 of 26 for game. 14 of 15 in the first half and 9 of 11 in the second half. This just shows that the guys are capable of good free throw shooting. Now we will wait to see if there is consistency in this category. Let’s hope so.
OFFICIATING B
The officials let the men play the game. To my old and inexperienced eyes, I detected no bias in the calls made in this game. I would love to see this type of officiating for the remainder of our games.
OVERALL B-
Two areas of the game kept us from grading out higher for this contest. Turnovers and offensive rebounding. I think we should see better results in our next game, especially in the turnover category. We have to, because we already know that Arkansas will be pressing us from he very start of the game. AIN’T it nice to see the results of what practice can do for you in some areas such as free throws. Onward and upward. Go Dawgs!!


ADDENDUM TO AUBURN REPORT CARD It came as somewhat of a surprise that no one has made any comments about something I have complained about in my report cards. And that is Offensive Rebounds. OR is a direct result of a missed shot by a team. After doing some further analysis of the play by play stat sheet, I have come up with the following. As I said above, an OR is the direct result of a missed shot. In this game, we had 23 misses and Auburn had 45 misses. We ended up with 12 OR and Auburn had 14 OR. To draw a better relationship to this, we had 34 DR to Auburn ’s 14 OR. That equates to us having almost two and half rebounds to their one off their board. Furthermore, their 14 OR only produced 7 points and three of those were free throws because of fouls. By the same token, Auburn pulled down 13 DR to our 12 OR. This is almost equal. But we did get 11 points off of the OR. Six of which were free throws because of Auburn fouls. I hope this makes more sense to you. I made this additional analysis after something Doug said in comment 7 to the original post. Another thing that I didn’t point out in the original post was points off steals by either team. We ended the game with 6 steals for 5 points while Auburn had 13 steals that they converted into 21 points. Let us hear from you via your comments