In their second of three games this week, the UCF Knights (3-1) fell to the Middle Tennessee Blue Raiders (3-1) in a 75-61 loss, finishing up a three game home stand.
Tristan Spurlock led the Knights in scoring with seventeen points, followed closely by Keith Clanton’s fifteen. The duo led the team in rebounds as well, amassing eight each.
The individual efforts were not enough however. “We were just playing selfish, I mean, selfish. Everybody was going one-on-one, trying to do their own thing. Coach would run a play and nobody would run it, and we had people more focused on offense than we did on defense. “
Middle Tennessee had come into the game as the Sun Belt Conference’s leader in scoring defense and scoring margin, key statistics when considering the chances of victory. The Blue Raiders outplayed UCF in almost every fashion, retaining a better shooting percentage, a better three-point percentage, fouling less, and rebounding more.
It was a fundamental loss for the Knights across the board. Spurlock assessed that the team didn’t give all it could in the second half, stating that “We just didn’t play none. We had no heart, we were playing soft, we let them out rebound us, everything.”
After a slow start that kept the Knights behind for the majority of the first period, a decisive dunk fed to Keith Clanton from Isaiah Sykes in first quarter brought the game to 13-12, giving UCF their first, albeit brief, lead on the day. Clanton went on to drain two important free throws later in the period to shift the momentum in UCF’s favor when he gave the team another lead, this time 23-22.
The Knights refused to relinquish the lead this time around however, and headed into the half with a 33-30 lead on the strength of Keith Clanton’s eight points and Tristan Spurlock’s five defensive rebounds.
The halftime lead was a misleading omen, as in each of their three previous wins this season, the Knights had led at the half.
UCF took advantage of their accuracy early on, shooting 54.5% on field goals to Middle Tennessee’s dismal 41.9% in the first half, but the storyline that would reverse itself out over the course of the game, as Middle Tennessee’s Raymond Cintron and Shawn Jones got hot. Cintron hit spirit killing three after spirit killing three, and the Knights struggled to respond, scoring 2 points to the Blue Raider’s next 16, falling from a 48-all-tie to a 64-50 deficit.
It was a decisive few minutes of play, and there would be no recovery for the Knights, who limped their way to a 75-61 final.
“Obviously they’re a very good basketball team, you know that’s a veteran team and you can see why they won 25-plus games last year,” Coach Donnie Jones observed after the loss. “But we still have to learn how to execute against a good team, and we didn’t do a very good job of that tonight.”
UCF will have one day of practice tomorrow and the Thanksgiving holiday to prepare for a Friday afternoon showdown against #7 Florida (4-0) in Gainesville at 4 p.m.
The Gators are coming off of a 58-40 victory tonight against Savannah State who UCF had just beaten, 53-50, two days prior.
