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Columbia Lions 46 at Kentucky Wildcats 56: Post Game Shrug

Meh. Games like this happen. It was an ugly win. These aren't the Wildcats you're looking for. Move along.

By Glenn Logan
Mark Zerof-USA TODAY Sports

Well, that was fun, in a getting-a-tooth-drilled-without-Novocaine kind of way. I didn’t see the first half, but I did see most of the second half. Fortunately, DVR is the modern answer to an unexpected unavailability, and I’ll carefully go over all that before getting up the postmortem tomorrow.

We have to give a huge shout-out to Columbia for coming in, beating the spread, and giving the #1 team in the nation a good lesson in how to minimize your weaknesses and maximize your strengths. Columbia is not really good at scoring points, but they are a good defensive team and they don’t beat themselves. They are perfectly willing and able, however, to allow their opponent to beat themselves with quick shots and bad judgment. From what I saw, that’s likely what happened, along with some hot shooting that is always a danger.

Game stats

Observations

  • 27 whole fouls? Man, that’s a low, low number.

  • Four turnovers for Kentucky? That’s great, but this couldn’t have been a 60-possession game. Still, that’s pretty good, bound to be well under 10%.

  • Columbia did nothing special. They made about their season average from three, about their season average from two, and about average offensive rebounding. What that tells me was that most of Kentucky’s game was well below average.

  • I see UK was missing Ulis and Booker. I can’t imagine that would make a huge difference, but I could be wrong.

  • Kentucky again struggled mightily from three. Well, I guess this is just one of those things that takes a while to go away. When it does, the lid is likely to explode off the basket. Good luck to the team that’s on the other side on that one.

I am a little surprised that Kentucky struggled so. I’ll no doubt get a good idea why after I see the first half, but the second half didn’t look that bad if you take away the quick threes and silly off-balance shots. When UK worked for a good look, or attacked the offensive glass, they were successful. Kentucky was also successful turning the Lions over in the second half. Apparently that wasn’t the case in the first.

Okay, well, a win is a win, ugly or otherwise. Columbia is going to make a lot of games look ugly this season because that’s how they give themselves a chance. File this one under "getting there" and worry not.

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