Marshall University Athletics
BOGACZYK: @HerdMBB Finds the Top, Wants to Stay There
1/29/2016 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
By JACK BOGACZYK
HERDZONE.COM COLUMNIST
HUNTINGTON, W.Va. - It's not quite worst-to-first. But it's definitely worse-to-first.
That pretty much describes the ascendency of Marshall men's basketball in Conference USA. In 10 previous seasons in the Texas-based league, even through membership alterations, the Herd never has really been a contender.
Yes, it's kind of been one of those "Groundhog Day" deals.
Yet, Coach Dan D'Antoni's second Herd team went to bed Thursday night with a share of the league lead, and now the club that shares the top spot with Marshall - defending C-USA Tournament champ and 2015-16 preseason favorite UAB (17-4, 7-1) - comes to the Henderson Center for a Saturday noon tip.
While the Blazers were having their nation-best 14-game win streak halted at Western Kentucky on Thursday night, Marshall was rolling past Middle Tennessee, 82-66, after the Blue Raiders came to town sharing second place with the Herd (11-10, 7-1).
Marshall has played better offensively this season and with a 45-percent night definitely has shot it better. The offensive efficiency was average - scoring on 35-of-76, but the Herd's point and ball distribution were strong. And defensively, the victory over Middle - Marshall's 10th in a row in C-USA at The Cam -- was the best effort of the season.
Middle Tennessee (14-6, 6-2) won the Great Alaska Shootout this season, and with a non-conference strength of schedule of 29 - one spot in front of Marshall - that tops C-USA, the Raiders have played VCU, Auburn, South Dakota State, Belmont and UAB. Those are all top 135 RPI teams.
"This night," said an impressed Middle Tennessee veteran Coach Kermit Davis after the loss, "it was the best team we've played all year."
Coaches always say the mark of a good team is winning without your "A" game. So, on a night when Marshall shot its worst percentage in eight C-USA games and endured foul trouble, how did things get so lopsided against a quality foe?
"It just shows that everybody on the team has bought into the system and we have so many different weapons," said Herd junior forward Ryan Taylor, who has been through the wrong-sided wringer in recent seasons. "So, if somebody doesn't shoot well or even two or three don't shoot well, we still have other starters who can pick up the slack or guys who will come off the bench to do that.
"I mean, every game has become a team effort. Even if we don't score 90 points, we still know how to grind because we went through a lot of those type of games last year. So, this year it's basically rolled over and I try to provide leadership, and we've got more talent than we had and everyone's on the same page."
The Herd is 7-1 in league play for the first time since 1996-97 - the final season in the Southern Conference and the first on the sidelines for a Mullens native who looked up to D'Antoni and his brother, Mike, while growing up - fellow MU Hall of Famer Greg White.
And if the Herd can topple UAB and get to 8-1? That hasn't occurred since the Southern Conference regular-season champions of 1987-88 started 8-1 en route to an NIT berth in a 24-8 season under the late Rick Huckabay.
Taylor and Co. were picked to finish ninth by C-USA coaches in the 14-team preseason poll. It was understandable, after consecutive seasons of 13-19, 11-22 and then 11-21 in the D'Antoni debut last winter. In those seasons, respectively, Marshall finished tied for ninth (6-10) among 12 teams, tied for 14th (4-12) among 16 clubs, and tied for 11th (7-11) among 14.
"We've got a long way to go," said Taylor, acknowledging that the UAB visit is only the halfway point of the C-USA season. "But we know where we came from and we don't want to go back there, so we just go out and do what we need to do to get better each and every day.
"We don't want to go back to the bottom of the conference, and having disarray sometimes on the court. I mean, we try to stay focused, try to stay locked in with a mindset of we're better, but we can still improve more."
Taylor is the veteran among the Herd, and has 2,305 minutes, 1,150 points and 639 rebounds in 84 games invested in a program that has seen mostly bad times in his previous seasons. Taylor and wing guard Austin Loop are the only returning starters, but transfers James Kelly, Jon Elmore and Stevie Browning sat out at MU last season and regularly saw what the Herd didn't want to go through again.
Things started to turn 53 weeks ago, when Marshall beat UTEP at home and finished the league regular season 7-5 after an 0-6 start. But there still weren't many believers - hence the C-USA preseason poll - and the 0-6 start this season seemed to underscore the doubts. The Herd is 11-4 since, with two of the losses to nationally ranked Maryland and West Virginia.
"Yeah, kind of, sort of," Taylor answered when asked if the turnaround has come sooner than he expected. "But I knew the group of guys I have around me this year - they love basketball. There's nothing they'd rather do than play basketball, learning about the game, even watching film ââ'¬Â¦ getting out here on the court on your own and getting shots up at night.
"So, it was kind of kind of quick. I knew getting Jon Elmore back (becoming eligible in mid-December following his transfer from VMI) was going to be big for us and however long it took him at point guard to get used to the system. But Jon adapted fast and that helped us out a lot."
In his postgame remarks, Taylor referenced C-USA as outside the sphere of the power conferences, and the league's play this season also has aided a building Herd. C-USA is ranked 21st among 32 leagues in conference RPI.
D'Antoni's club first got the Elmore boost, then padded its growing confidence with three home dates to start the C-USA season. Marshall went to the Lone Star State and won at struggling North Texas and Rice, and then got a road split with a defense-poor loss at Charlotte and grind-it-out win at Old Dominion.
One thing the Herd brings to its games - even on uneven nights offensively or defensively - is player and ball movement. Opponents can't play passing lanes because foes can't know where the passing lanes are - because the Herd isn't always quite sure of those lanes.
So, is that energy because the Herd now understands D'Antoni's system, or because winning has fueled the pacre-happy "organized chaos."
"I'd say it's almost 50-50," Taylor said. "I mean we played so well at home this year (7-2), but the big thing is we've been better on the road. We've got three (conference) road wins this season. We feed off one another now.
"There's a lot of energy up and down the line - the managers, the head coach, the staff, the players. It feeds down to everybody. And just being through those games before, we learned and we know what we've got to do to win. We're an excited bunch of guys who are ready to go out and win ballgames and have the City of Huntington ready for Marshall basketball being back."
Marshall was girded by a strong degree of difficulty in non-conference play. Seven of the 11 losses have came to RPI top 100 teams. Eight of the 13 non-league games were out-of-towners. And now the Herd's convenience-store win totals (7, 11) match those numbers for all of last season.
The three C-USA road wins? Marshall has won more than three league away dates only once in 10 years - a 6-2 mark that was part of an 11-5 finish in 2009-10, the final season for Coach Donnie Jones before his exit to UCF. That also is the only season the Herd was seeded higher (No. 4) than sixth in the C-USA Tournament.
Yes, the Herd is only to the halfway point when it tangles with UAB on Saturday, and still must go to Middle and UAB and make another trip to Texas (UTEP, UTSA) next week, but in a conference with only five of 14 teams above .500 in league play, Marshall seems poised for one of the tournament byes that go to the top five teams.
Ninth place seems so rear-view mirror now.
"When we were picked (ninth), my thought was, 'They don't know what we have here now,'" Taylor said. "All they wrote about was maybe me - because they knew me - or Coach D'Antoni being in his second year, stuff like that.
"I didn't really look at it like, 'Man, oh well, we're picked ninth.' I just looked at it like, 'OK, let's go out and show them what we have.' I knew what we had. They didn't. Now, everybody knows what we have, and it feels really good."
