A season that began with great expectations in the American Athletic Conference for the USF women’s basketball team has suddenly turned into a desperate situation.
After beginning conference play with four wins, the Bulls have dropped two straight, the latest of which was a stunning 62-61 home court loss Tuesday to UAB. USF fell to fourth place in the AAC, and it boils down to two things: the Bulls are shooting abysmally, and they aren’t playing defense up to their standard.
“We took 21 more shots than they did. We got 15 offensive rebounds to their seven,” Bulls coach Jose Fernandez said. “We had seven turnovers to their 16. So then you look okay, how'd you lose? Well, 32 (percent shooting). They shot 43 percent from the floor, and we shoot 32.”
It’s even worse than that. After closing the first quarter ahead by seven points, the Bulls were 15-for-55 (27.2 percent) over the last three quarters. The most glaring stat was the 1-for-17 shooting line for Sammie Puisis, USF’s leading scorer.
Carla Brito (21 points) and Vittoria Blasigh (18) did their best to pick up the slack, but it wasn’t enough.
“I told them there's got to be a big sense of responsibility and accountability,: Fernandez said. “How many games have we played – 19. After you play 19 games, other teams know who to guard and who not to guard.
“What’s going on with some of the players on our teams, the opponents are not guarding guys. If you're not being guarded, that's a big problem, right?”
Defense has been a problem lately, too.
“We have four film sessions. We watch personnel, we watch man, we watch their defense, we watch their special situations. We needed to have our toes on the three-point line and our hands up,” Fernandez said.
“They hit a lot of lot of three-point shots where our hands down. They got a lefty point guard. She went right one time, and the one time when she went right, we fouled her. She got downhill whenever she wanted and a lot of times it was wasn't even with a screen.”
The conference losses to North Texas and UAB could have a chilling effect on USF’s post-season hopes unless the Bulls right the ship quickly. They could be in the position of needing to win the AAC tournament to get an NCAA bid.
“An at-large bid is going to be very difficult,” Fernandez said.
While getting to the NCAA tournament is obviously the goal, the Bulls need to be a little more basic right now. They need to rediscover the team that beat 10th-ranked Duke and had six consecutive wins before this two-game slide.
“So, where do you go from here? You don't want a loss to affect the next game, but there's no excuse for us to play as poorly as we did today offensively,” Fernandez said. “It shouldn't happen.”
Unfortunately, in this case the numbers don’t lie.