This is hard to watch. One of the worst defenses I've seen. Notre Dame does nothing great except shoot the ball on open shots.

We don't even use our fouls to make Notre Dame earn it at the line. Layup after layup after wide open shot for Notre Dame. Just ridiculous.

You realize we aren't playing some scrub team right? ND is a #1 seed for a reason. They have a bunch of highly recruited players.

Calling people wimps on the internet? Tough talk.

This is not even about Notre Dame. We don't even do the fundamentals like boxing out. Notre Dame has a girl who has made 7 three pointers and every one of her shots has been wide open (uncontested). It's bizarre. You'd think we could find a way to guard her and not help off of her. You know, like how you play defense (make adjustments). We are being seriously out-coached. I can't tell their players are much superior since we have Carter. Then we grossly underuse Williams for some odd reason.

GB hired that other guy--Starkley or something-- to coach defense. We have not been real good in that time.

This is not even close to the first game Blair's team has played little to no defense since Vic left.

Blair won't do it but he needs to try a new defensive coach!

A little disappointing to watch. We had them then lost our poise, not good d especially on threes. Wide open. Stop the the threes and we win.

I will leave it to the Blair defenders or was it the players? This game was winnable.

We haven't had a defense since Vic left.

Well he is only running his defense with four people. Carter is a monster on offense but she has never cared about defense. SHe is an oportunistic defensive player. If a ball shows up near her and she can get it, she will. Will she play a defensive scheme? Not so much. She was that way in High School where I was friends with her coach. Blair knew he was just getting an offensive player when he recruited her and if not for her they wouldn't have made it to the Sweet 16, but he has his hands full teacher her how to defend and he is well aware of that.

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yarddog8 said:

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Gary said at a resent clinic that this years defense was the best ever. Delusional

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"resent" instead of "recent" - a Freudian slip?

I find it hard to believe that this wasn't misheard given what he and the other coaches have said throughout the season about

• The lack of a lockdown defender on the team, with Lumpkin as the best available
• Comments in the mid season about the team starting to learn the matchup zone
• Ongoing comments from the coaches about Carter's learning curve on D.

Carter's D has improved over the season, IMO. Seemed to me that the breakdowns yesterday were on the whole team at different times rather than ND exploiting a specific matchup, at least until Anriel got her 4th foul. They probably would have scored anyway on the play, but there was a late layup by ND where it looked to me like Anriel hustled back, thought better of challenging the shot in order to avoid fouling, and as a result screened Jaz running back.

I imagine that the team will spend some time looking at film on what went wrong on the different 3 pointers at some point. I don't know how much they're done now vs when they start prep for next season.

Here's one of the inbounds plays from the ND twitter.

Mabrey runs around a double screen. Carter doesn't follow but it looks like she's expecting Jaz to switch. You can see Carter pointing as Mabrey starts her run. Westbeld, who is the outside screener, rolls away from the basket to screen Danni from helping.

Here's Mabrey's shot chart

The replay above is the one that's on the right but not quite in the corner. The two from the left and right corners were also inbounds plays. Ogunbowale also hit a 3 on an inbounds play.

There's a miss from the left side that's the one where ND was calling for a deflection on an air ball. The play by play at 12thman.com gives Jaz credit for blocking that!

A&M is a terrible defensive team. It's not debatable. And until Blair hires a real defensive coach again, this will only continue. The lack of fundamentals was shockingly bad throughout most of this season. Vic would lose his mind if he were coaching this team, but he would also turn it around quickly on the defensive end.

Houstonag said:

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A little disappointing to watch. We had them then lost our poise, not good d especially on threes. Wide open. Stop the the threes and we win.

I will leave it to the Blair defenders or was it the players? This game was winnable.

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11-20 free throws vs 6-8 = loss ! Was that lack of defense ?

HiddenAg2 said:

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A&M is a terrible defensive team. It's not debatable. And until Blair hires a real defensive coach again, this will only continue. The lack of fundamentals was shockingly bad throughout most of this season. Vic would lose his mind if he were coaching this team, but he would also turn it around quickly on the defensive end.

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I think it's entirely debatable at best whether A&M is terrible. I don't think we're great, but terrible is way too strong, IMO. It's very TexAgs though. No gray area. This advanced stats site has us as pretty decent.

https://herhoopstats.com/leaderboard/team/hhs_def_rtg/2018

In general there's a lack of good advanced stats analytics for wbb. 538 wrote about the disappearance of the leading site: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-website-went-offline-and-took-most-of-womens-college-basketball-analytics-with-it/

Her Hoops Stats is trying to fill that void (but I'm too cheap to pay for either)

I'd be interested in what you think are the problems with fundamentals. I have some thoughts on that, but i'm curious to hear whether yours fit with mine.

Not much a coach can do when a team doesn't follow the scout when the rotation is 6 players. If anyone has watched closely, only freshmen players take charges or even attempt to do so. If there is no fear of being taken out of the game for defensive lapses, there isn't much incentive to put much effort into the D. There will be 9 sophomores on the team next year, so you won't see or hear much about 2018 recruits because that 2017 class that was top ten will be adding 2 MCAA's and 2 from the 2016 class who redshirted. I would suspect that you'll see a change in attitude and a lot more players on the court next season.

I haven't paid as much attention to stats the last few years as I once did, but one statistic that I always checked was the number of shots taken by opponents. The Aggies, during the hey day of defense, usually got 10-12 more shots per game than their opponents. That's 8 or more points per game. Great defense made it difficult for opponents to get any shot, much less good shots. Obviously fewer shots taken generally means fewer points.

This team gave up over 68 points per game this season. The 2011 National Champion team gave up 57.2 ppg.

Gary was on Texags with Gabe this morning. He mentioned free throws and inbounds defense. If we make our average on free throws it's an even game with a minute left and we have Chennedy. The other stat I noticed was that Danni only took 5 shots.
Notre Dame is really good, They lost by 9 at UCONN and twice to Louisville, and only 3 other teams came within 6 points of them. This team had a legitimate shot at the Final 4 but Notre Dame made a few more plays than we did.

JR69 said:

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I haven't paid as much attention to stats the last few years as I once did, but one statistic that I always checked was the number of shots taken by opponents. The Aggies, during the hey day of defense, usually got 10-12 more shots per game than their opponents. That's 8 or more points per game. Great defense made it difficult for opponents to get any shot, much less good shots. Obviously fewer shots taken generally means fewer points.

This team gave up over 68 points per game this season. The 2011 National Champion team gave up 57.2 ppg.

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The FGA differential you're talking about is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure what it measures. Seems like it's a combination of D and rebounding. That said, there's a clear difference between before and after Vic, and Miss State is more like what he did here:

Miss State 2017-18
FGA 2352
Opp FGA 2019
Turnovers 391
Opp turnovers 688
Rebounding margin 5.4

Ags
FGA 2250
Opp FGA 2282
Turnovers 475
Opp turnovers 465
Rebounding margin 8.8

I looked at the historical numbers for all of Blair's years and FGA differential was pretty consistently in the hundreds before Vic left, which also corresponds to moving to the SEC.

I'm not sure it measures anything in particular - just an interesting (to me) observation. I agree with you - the change in numbers corresponds precisely with Vic's departure and move to the SEC. I think it has more to do with the former than the latter.