Moving Forward from a Broken Streak

I’ll put it bluntly: last night sucked. We played our worst game of the year, lost at Alabama, and had our nation-leading fourteen-game winning streak snapped. Alabama didn’t even have Collin Sexton, but that didn’t matter. John Petty went wild, more unconscious than Hansel in a walk-off against Derek Zoolander. He hit eight threes, we couldn’t make a shot, couldn’t shoot free throws, couldn’t hold onto the ball, etc.

It was bad.

But hey, Bruce Pearl said himself today that Alabama’s the most talented team we’ll face. That may be true. He also said it was a missed opportunity. That’s a fact.

We played our worst game of the season and actually might have been able to ice the game with free throws down the stretch. Despite hitting only a small fraction of the foul shots we were awarded, we still had a play to win the game down 73-71. After hitting seven threes in the first half, it took us until there were only four minutes to play before we hit our first of the second half. All that said, if Bryce Brown doesn’t step out of bounds on the final play we drew up, who knows what might happen. We could’ve escaped with an improbable and fortunate win, but we didn’t.

Hey, no time to dwell on that 40 minutes of basketball. We’ve got much more coming up.

Thankfully we get to head home to Auburn Arena over the next couple of weeks. We’ll have four of the next six at home, and we’ll play two of the teams manning the bottom of the SEC standings in Vanderbilt and Texas A&M.

Before the schedule lightens a bit, we get one of the top players in the league this weekend.

To make matters worse, the wintry weather prevented Auburn from getting home last night, and so the routine will be thrown off just a bit heading into the Georgia game this weekend. While the Bulldogs have some head-scratching results, it’s more of a testament to the fact that the SEC is tougher than ever this season.

Georgia lost to UMass in the non-con, but blew out Alabama in SEC play. They also lost to South Carolina at home, but beat LSU on the road. The Bulldogs can be hit-and-miss, and hopefully it’ll be their time to miss this weekend on the Plains. Last year they beat Auburn 96-84 in Auburn, and 79-78 in Athens. It’s time for the Tigers to exact some revenge and start a new streak. Hopefully this loss to Alabama was a reality check, as it’s not really likely that the Tigers can start slower or play much worse than they did in Tuscaloosa last night.

Beat Georgia, and it’ll set Auburn up in a good position with momentum heading out to CoMo. The Tigers should be favored in all of the next six games, and if they can win four or five of those, we may be talking about the guarantee of a tournament berth.

First things first. Dawgs on Saturday, and then the rest. War Eagle!