By Mark Bennett
Perhaps the most ominous thought on the Indiana
State Sycamores' potential fate this season was unwittingly spoken
by Creighton Coach Dana Altman on Sunday afternoon.
Moments after his Bluejays routed Missouri
Valley Conference rival ISU 70-46 in Omaha Civic Auditorium,
Altman said of his team, "We're not anywhere near good enough
right now to contend for our league."
Where that leaves the Sycamores is anyone's
guess.
After opening MVC play with an 85-71 loss
at Drake and Sunday's defeat at Creighton, Indiana State (2-6
overall, 0-2 in the conference) have three more chances to regroup
in non-conference play before hitting the grueling 16-game Missouri
Valley home-stretch. The Sycamores play at Wyoming (6-3) tonight
at 9:05, and then return home from a three-game road swing to
play Ball State (6-2), a team ranked 23rd in this week's USA
Today-ESPN Coaches Poll, before playing host to 8-1 Bowling Green
on Dec. 29.
The site of tonight's game is Laramie's Arena-Auditorium.
Cowboys fans call it the Dome of Doom.
To avoid living up to that name, the Sycamores
hope to avoid another second-half swoon. Solid first-half performances
crumbled after halftime in lopsided losses to Valparaiso, Butler
and Creighton. ISU had battled the Bluejays to a 30-30 score
at intermission, only to get swamped by a 24-4 Creighton run
to start the second half. To make matters worse, the Bluejays
rallied with their star player, Kyle Korver, on the sidelines
in street clothes with a knee injury.
In 15 years as a college basketball head coach,
ISU's Royce Waltman has never had a team so devoid of confidence.
"Often the lack of confidence is for
a good reason. We just seem to not be able to make plays. I mean,
really, really good players don't lack confidence," Waltman
said Sunday. "So I just think we need to work on our skill
level, becoming better players. The confidence, that's a result
of not being able to make certain plays, and we've just got to
get better."
The veteran players seem baffled too. Seniors
Djibril Kante, Kelyn Block and Terence Avery have made back-to-back
NCAA Tournament trips in the previous two seasons. Now in just
the third week of December, the only hope of another Big Dance
ticket seems to be a miraculous sweep of the MVC Tournament in
March, unless some problems get fixed quickly.
But where do you start?
"I really don't have an answer for that,"
Kante said. "We've tried a lot of different things, and
so far a lot of different things haven't worked. It's pretty
much the team's going to have to come together. I'm not so sure
there's much the coach can do. He's trying everything he can.
I think as a team, as players, we ought to start playing together,
not as individuals."
After a tight first-half at Creighton, the
Sycamores unraveled. They hit just 4 of 18 second-half shots
and turned the ball over 11 times, struggling to move upcourt
against the Bluejays' full-court press. Creighton outscored ISU
40-16 in the second half. So far this season, opponents have
outscored the Sycamores a combined 281-230 after halftime.
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| Tribune-Star/Joseph
C. Garza |
| To the hoop: Indiana State's
Marcus Howard (center) drives through a crowd with the ball against
Murray State earlier this month. |
Sunday's defeat was ISU's worst in MVC play
since an 82-58 loss at Southern Illinois on Jan. 24, 1998. And
their 46-point total was the lowest by a Sycamore team since
a 64-46 loss at Evansville on Dec. 29, 1992.
Now they'll face two teams fresh off hefty
weekend victories. Wyoming thumped Montana State 82-69, and Ball
State pounded IUPUI 103-81.
"It definitely doesn't get easier. It's
going to be hard work," said Kante, who led the Sycamores
with 11 points and six rebounds in Sunday's loss. "But if
we want to be a team, we'll have to pull together. No games are
going to be easy for us, the way we're standing right now. So
we're just going to have to fight for everything."
Though ISU's assistant coaches will have prepared
a scouting report on Coach Steve McClain's Wyoming Cowboys, Waltman
is far more concerned about his own team. When opposing teams
surge, the Sycamores seem to fade in equal measure.
Trying to figure out a remedy for that --
if that's possible -- is Waltman's priority. His previous ISU
teams compiled a four-year record of 74-45 and won the 2000 MVC
regular-season title and the 2001 MVC Tournament title.
"We probably won't do much about Wyoming,"
Waltman said. "I've just never had a team that gave in like
this. And we've got to get past that. If we get beat, we get
beat. But we've got to quit giving in to the other team."
Amid the Sycamores' problems, Wyoming beat
writers speaking with Cowboys Coach Steve McClain asked if he
was disappointed tonight's matchup had turned out to not be a
"quality" non-conference game. He reminded the media
the clash with Indiana State hadn't happened yet.
"You have to remember, this is the same
team that last year lost [six of its last eight] games and then
went to the Missouri Valley Conference Tournament, won, and then
went to the NCAA Tournament," McClain said of the Sycamores.
"So they know it's a long season."
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