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Big Joe's Commentary

2/21/06
by Joe Dlugosz

I saw something that I almost forgot about Saturday afternoon at the Gentile Center. The Ramblers were playing inspired team basketball and doing just about everything right for about 15 minutes last Saturday. And you know what happened over those 15 minutes? The Ramblers erased an 18-point lead and stormed back to win over the visiting Fairfield Stags by three, a 21-point swing.

After slogging through the first half and the opening minutes of the second half something finally clicked for the Ramblers. The defense was ratcheted up a notch and soon after shots started to fall for the Ramblers. Shots started getting a bit tougher to find for the Stags and the intensity and energy of the Gentile Center started to rise. It was a welcome sight to see.

Now if the Ramblers can just keep it up they might find themselves on a bit of a roll come the conference tournament. And there is not better time of year to get on a roll than late February into March.

Some other things will have to happen, though. Namely the Ramblers will have to win games they aren’t supposed to. It hasn’t happened once in conference play and, I think, that is why the Ramblers have a somewhat disappointing conference record of 6-8 heading into the last two games of the season. The Ramblers have lost games they were supposed to win, but they have yet to win a game they were supposed to lose.

People may ask what is this “supposed to” stuff? It’s not particularly hard to explain. When the Ramblers went to Cleveland at the start of the season with an 8-2 record against the struggling CSU Vikings we were all pretty confident the Ramblers would win. They did. That was a game the Ramblers were supposed to win and they did. Coming home for the next contest against Youngstown State everyone felt the Ramblers were going to win pretty easily. That was a game the Ramblers were supposed to win, but didn’t.

Going through the conference schedule I don’t see one game where the Ramblers pulled off the upset. There’s not a game where the Ramblers left us saying afterwards that we didn’t expect them to pull that one off, because they haven’t yet. They came close in Milwaukee and gave Detroit a run, but not much else. The disappointing losses are, unfortunately, more plentiful.

Losing at home to Youngstown hurt, losing at Wright State was kind of disheartening, and slogging through a home loss to Green Bay was frustrating. Get those three games and the year takes on a whole new look. Get those three games which, at the time, seemed winnable to all Ramblers fans and Loyola is competing for a top three spot in the Horizon League.

That’s history now, it can’t be changed. But the season is far from over and if the Ramblers can bring the intensity and teamwork they showed in the second half of Saturday’s game into the rest of the season they won’t be a team anyone wants to play. If the Ramblers can give that effort for 40 minutes each night there’s not a team in the Horizon League they won’t be able to beat.

But can they do it for 40 minutes? Fifteen minutes was good enough on Saturday against a team with nine wins, but when February 28 rolls around every Horizon League team knows that a loss means their next game is in November. When the Horizon League tournament starts 15 minutes gets a front row seat for the rest of the weekend, right next to the rest of the fans. Heck, when the Horizon League tournament starts 40 minutes may not even be good enough. Now is the time to play every second of every game, now is the time when we’ll see if these Ramblers can live up the expectations they gave us earlier in the year.

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