The Knight-led Raiders will face a more difficult task tomorrow night as they face-off against 17th ranked Marquette . Much like Tech, Marquette has three guards who lead them in scoring: Dominic James, Jarel McNeal and Wesley Matthews. Of their 4 games their last two have been routs as they beat Eastern Michigan 95 to 62 and Detroit, 87 to 45. Interestingly, they had an overtime win against Idaho State as their offensive performance was severely lacking. During that game they only made 19 of 65 field goals, which is a 29% clip. Marquette's last game against Eastern Michigan they shot 13 of 27 from beyond the arc.
I was able to watch the Coach Knight Show tonight and he said all the same things that he said after the North Dakota State loss, except he insinuated that he might bench Zeno and Jackson after what Coach Knight believed to be an inexcusable defensive performance. It will be interesting to see if Knight follows through with this threat. He also mentioned that he didn't feel like this team was playing hard for 40 minutes. He made the analogy that when he coached at Army, he knew that his teams would play hard and the opponent would know that they'd be in for a tough game. Knight doesn't see this in this current team. Let's see how they react to that.
It will be interesting to continue to watch Rizvic and Plefka continue to mature as post players. In watching some of the highlights from the three previous games, Plefka seemed much more athletic than what I remember him from last year and he did a pretty good job of finding the open man in the offense.
Burgess looks to be really good, very talented, can definitely play the point, which would free up Jackson to play off the ball a little more.
Tomorrow night's game will be on ESPNU.