Arkansas: post mortem

Sometimes you lose a basketball game, and sometimes you get beat.  Last night, Georgia got beat.  That is certainly not to say they played a perfect game, but what we saw would beat every SEC team not named Kentucky on almost any given night.

That's small consolation, of course, to a team fighting hard for a tournament berth.  There is no doubt the loss represents a setback, but it is not time to panic yet.  It does, however, ratchet up the pressure just a bit more in Baton Rouge on Saturday:

• A huge amount of credit needs to go to the students.  The student section was almost full 30 minutes before tip, and it was overflowing by the time the game started.  I hope a loss like this doesn't deter them from showing out again a week from Saturday.
• The rest of the crowd was OK.  Late arriving, as it standard fare for a weekday game in Athens, and a little more sparse than I'd like.
• Sometimes you run into a hot player, and that makes it very hard to win.  Georgia ran into two.  Bobby Portis was every bit the NBA prospect he was sold as, offensively at least, in the first half.  Then Alandise Harris simply refused to miss in the second.
• The two are related, of course.  Portis was so good he demanded extra attention.  That forced Georgia to be a little softer on jump shooters than they normally are.  Harris made them pay.
• Arkansas came in ranked #23, and that looked about right to me.  They're not top 10, but they're a tournament team if I've ever seen one.
• In my head, Georgia is somewhere around a top 50 team, and that looked about right too.
• That has to be the best first half Georgia has played in a long time.  The fact that the lead was only 7 at halftime turned out to be a bit foreboding.
• There were a lot of big plays in the game, but let me point you to one sequence you may have forgotten.  Georgia had the lead at 13 in the first half after a Thornton dunk and a Gaines three, and Djurisic found himself wide open for a 3-point attempt.  Had it gone in, Stegeman would have lost its collective mind and the whole tenor of the first half could have changed.  Instead, it rimmed out, and Portis scored 5 quick to bring the Razorbacks right back.  Easy to wonder what if, but if I could have willed that baby in, I surely would have.
• Speaking of "what if," I try not to do this often, but I found myself wondering last night what might have been had Brandon Morris had a better head on his shoulders...
• I've said all along there would be a game where missed free throws would cost Georgia a win.  I'm not sure this was that game, but I am sure a couple more makes would have helped.  Juwan Parker's 2-5 stands out, especially since he's statistically one of Georgia's better free throw shooters, and one of the misses was the front end of a 1-and-1.
• We shouldn't let that mar what was a really nice game for Parker, though.  More of that, please.
• So how do you lose when you out-rebound your opponent 40-25 (including 16-7 offensively)?  Turning the ball over 17 times is a good place to start.  It's long been on my wish list that Fox would stop employing some sort of ball pressure.  Maybe then Georgia could figure out how to consistently break the press, a bugaboo of the Fox era.
• Finally, Yante Maten deserves a mention.  The stat line wasn't that impressive, but at some point Fox decided Maten was his best option against Portis and it worked.  The young man plays hard on defense, and if his offense keeps coming around (that up and under in the first half was pretty), Georgia won't miss much of a beat when Marcus Thornton graduates.

Fox has a couple of days to rally the troops.  It's a big one on Saturday, folks.