Wednesday, December 22, 1999
Sooners, not lament for UC
No.4 Bearcats face No. 21 Oklahoma tonight
BY MIKE DeCOURCY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
NORMAN, Okla. — There is no time to mourn. There is time for the University of Cincinnati Bearcats to practice, travel and study up on what sort of basketball team the Oklahoma Sooners have become, but not to wallow in the fallout from another Skyline Chili Crosstown Shootout defeat.
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UC at OKLAHOMA
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• When: 9 p.m. today
• Where: Noble Center
• Records: UC 8-1; Oklahoma 9-0
• TV: ESPN
• Radio: WLW-AM (700)
BY THE NUMBERS
• 21: Average 3-point attempts in a game for Oklahoma.
• 6.0: DerMarr Johnson's scoring average in UC's two closest games.
• .777: Ryan Fletcher's 3-point percentage for UC over the past five games.
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They can look backward for a clinical examination of their many mistakes against the Musketeers, but if the Bearcats spend more emotion on that episode, they risk creating a rerun in today's 9 p.m. game against the No.21-ranked Sooners.
“We've got to be able to bounce back off a loss,” said UC center Kenyon Martin. “You can't worry about it. I think if we worry about losing, then we're going to lose again.”
The Bearcats are not especially well-practiced at how to behave after defeats. They lost only five regular-season games last year, three of them in one numbing two-week slump.
It is an interesting coincidence, though, that in the second year of a two-year series with the Sooners, this is the second time UC has faced them directly after absorbing its first defeat.
“Are we that powerful that they look ahead to us and screw up the game before us?” Sooners coach Kelvin Sampson said.
In 1998-99, UC went 15 games without a loss, fell by a basket at UNC Charlotte and then recovered to manhandle Oklahoma at the Shoemaker Center. This time, the Bearcats remained undefeated through eight games.
“If you can't come back and play a little harder after you lose,” coach Bob Huggins said, “somebody needs to check your pulse.”
Oklahoma (9-0) will present the Bearcats (8-1) with many of the same challenges as Xavier did.
The Sooners operate a three-guard offense with a power forward, Eduardo Na jera, who is rugged on the inside and graceful on the perimeter. That presents some matchup concerns for UC.
Ordinarily, a power player who can hang on the perimeter would be a natural assignment for Martin, which was the case when the Bearcats played North Carolina. Much of the Sooners' offense goes through Najera, though, and Huggins does not like to risk exposing Martin to foul trouble.
With OU employing three guards 6-foot-2 or shorter, it's not feasible to use Pete Mickeal against Najera, although Mickeal held him to 4-of-15 shooting when Najera was a small forward last season.
Mickeal said he'd like another shot, but he'll instead guard 6-2 freshman J.R. Raymond, who averages 18 points and leads Oklahoma with a .543 3-point percentage. Martin said he expects to start against 6-10 Renzi Stone — who's not an offensive threat — but is likely to take over if Najera becomes difficult for Jermaine Tate to handle.
“He's probably one of the best inside-outside players in the whole country, and it's really hard to defend somebody like that,” senior forward Ryan Fletcher said. “We'll probably throw a lot of guys at him, mix up our defenses a little bit, try to confuse him and really try to deny him the ball — make the other guys on the team make plays.”
Huggins annually restates his belief a team should not need to lose in order to learn something from a game, but he nonetheless expects it from his players. He hopes what he could not convince his players as he noticed their attention to detail waning in recent weeks became a message delivered by the Musketeers.
“The more I do this, the more I think everybody's got to reach down and push whatever button it is themselves,” Huggins said. “It's like a horse race. You don't see them whipping the horse right out of the gate and whipping them the whole way around the track. They use the whip judiciously.”
What bothered Huggins at least as much as the malaise that gripped the Bearcats after Xavier switched to its 1-3-1 zone defense was their inattention to detail as the game approached.
“You can only only say the guy shot-fakes 8,000 times and hope somebody will remember one of them. And we didn't,” said Huggins, referring to XU forward Kevin Frey, who scored the Musketeers' final six points. “That's just a lack of concentration that we normally don't have.”
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