They had struggled all through an unsightly season, and now they were floundering again, trailing by 12 at halftime and by 18 with just 12:42 remaining. But suddenly they began to rally.
Finally, with just four seconds remaining, the point guard stepped to the line, calmly dropped in his 11th and 12th consecutive free throws of the day and handed his team a most unlikely win.
That was the script Houston (5-15, 2-6) followed Sunday while defeating Charlotte and picking up just its fifth victory of the year, its second against a Conference USA opponent. Now the Cougars are set to visit Allstate Arena for a Wednesday night date with DePaul (10-11, 2-7), which in its own struggling season has rarely displayed the kind of fortitude the Cougars did against the 49ers.
“I’m really proud of that,” Houston coach Ray McCallum said. “We’ve been in those situations before and kind of given in. I thought we really hung in there.
“We as coaches always stress compete, compete, compete. This time we got a couple of shots to go down, and that put us in a position to pull out a victory we really needed. Hopefully, it will give us confidence.”
The day before Houston upended Charlotte, DePaul was buried at Cincinnati.
“The thing I’m really proud of is our guys continued to play hard to the end. They didn’t quit,” Blue Demons coach Pat Kennedy said.
That was true enough, but long before the end, DePaul had tumbled into a hole no amount of hard work would let it escape.
The script was as familiar as Houston’s was new, and explained well enough why these Demons are 1-9 when trailing with five minutes remaining in a game. They were inconsistent. It was, again, as simple as that. They played well for substantial periods, which kept them in the game, but then they muddled through a stretch littered with untimely turnovers, a lack of aggression on the boards and poor shooting from the field and the foul line.
It was that stretch that doomed them to another defeat, made their continued effort irrelevant and–most tellingly–exposed their most glaring deficiencies. The Demons lack depth–their bench was outscored by the Bearcats’ 38-6. Their guards have difficulty matching up defensively–the Bearcats’ Steve Logan regularly toasted Demon Joe Tulley while scoring 22. They suffer significantly when their outside shots, the least reliable part of any team’s game, are not falling. Tulley and Bobby Simmons were a combined 3-for-19 overall, 2-for-9 on three-pointers.
“For us to compete, we have to shoot the ball better at the wing position,” Kennedy said.
True enough, but more than that, more than anything else, the Demons must do a better job of shedding their season-long malaise and competing willfully and intelligently for a full 40 minutes. They didn’t do that in their season opener against Division II Lewis, which they rallied to beat after trailing by 10 at halftime, and they didn’t do it again at Cincinnati, which they trailed by nine at halftime on their way to a 21-point defeat.
Rarely, in fact, have they put in a full game’s work this year, which is why their season is a shambles and why their NCAA tournament hopes are dead and why they have never staged a rally such as Houston did against Charlotte.
“We’ve learned a lot, but we have just not played consistent enough to win,” Kennedy said.
