For 20 minutes Friday night on the road at 16th-ranked Memphis, the USF men’s basketball team rekindled memories from a year ago.
They fought, scrapped, and looked every bit like a team that last season swept to the American Athletic Conference regular-season championship.
Alas, it’s a 40-minute game, which was 20 minutes too long for the Bulls. The Tigers pulled away from a halftime tie with USF for an 84-68 win. They celebrated their regular-season AAC title by cutting down the nets and showering the court with confetti – just like the Bulls did last year.
It was the fourth straight loss for USF and seventh in its last eight games. The Bulls open the AAC tournament on Thursday at 12:30 p.m. as the 9th-seeded team. They’ll play either Temple or Wichita State.
Anything we’d say about the Bulls now would be a broken record. Interim coach Ben Fletcher has done a commendable job under impossible circumstances, and we know what those are.
Watching USF play its guts out against a superior opponent, the thought occurred that while the Bulls were beaten for the 18th time this season, they weren’t defeated.
“I thought the one thing we did a really good job of in the first half was taking care of the basketball. And I thought that in the first four minutes (of the second half), our turnovers killed us in that spot and gave them momentum,” Fletcher said in his post-game radio interview.
The Tigers went from a tie game to a seven-point lead in those four minutes Fletcher referenced. The crowd was in it by that time, and Memphis eventually raced to an 18-point advantage.
No matter what athletic director Michael Kelly decides about the future of this program, Fletcher and his staff deserve every good thing that can be said about them. They held this program together when it could have disintegrated following the death of head coach Amir Abdur-Rahim. It also speaks to the quality of the players wearing the USF uniform.
There will be plenty of time to address the Bulls’ need next season for more consistent three-point shooting. They’ll have to replace Brandon Stroud, the heart and soul of the team.
Even though he had an off-night offensively against the Tigers – scoring just six points before fouling out – he attacked the boards with his usual all-out energy. His 13 rebounds led both teams.
For now, though, only the conference tournament remains. For the Bulls, it’s one last time together. For the rest of us, it’s wondering what might have been.