Vandy At South Carolina - Thoughts About The Battle

Fun game today in Carolina with the exception that Vandy won, 89-79.

Strange game with an eight-minute delay after a transformer blew behind the arena which caused some of the court lights to go out. Play was held after the timeout although there was enough light to play. The TV people said they were okay and the picture was fine, so the game started back. About five minutes later, the lights that had gone out, were coming back on slowly.

Besides that, Vandy was no doubt the better team. Without hesitation, they're the best team that I've seen this year in person and I would expect them to give Kentucky fits in both games. They're a quality 10-11 deep team and they push the ball a lot unlike year's past.

Ogilvy is back anchoring the middle and does a pretty good job although he appears to be just a guy at first look. He finished with 22 points today and nine rebounds in 25 minutes. He went out for about 5-8 minutes with a foot problem. Jeffrey Taylor had 16 and John Jenkins added 10. In all, Vandy scored 30 points off the bench compared to USC's seven.

Dores shot 61 percent for the game, mostly off their fast breaks or putbacks. Vandy used their physical game and outrebounded USC, 39-24.

Devan Downey scored 35 and looked unreal but for most of the game, looked really tired. Should something happen to Downey, USC will be a below average team.

USC's depth is maybe eight deep and then drops off. There's really no sub for Downey. The Gamecocks, try to press teams aggressively because they have to force turnovers. Along with the defense, Downey needs to go off each game. If both are working, they're dangerous and pretty good. When one lets down, they're back to an average team. They are really missing Dominique Archie and Mike Holmes, 40 percent of their offense in the early games in which they both played.

In the LSU game, USC was fresher and was the more experienced team. Today, they didn't appear to be fresh and played a much deeper team. I would suspect this would come into factor for the UK game as well. On Jan. 20, the Gamecocks play at Ole Miss. On Jan. 23, USC is at Florida. On the 26th at 9 p.m. UK comes to town.

As far as UK goes, on the 23rd the Cats are at home against Arkansas and then travel to USC on the 26th. So besides having to travel, it would appear that Kentucky should be the freshest team at that point.

One final thing, can't wait to see Downey take on John Wall. This has the makings for a real battle of speed and agility.

Downey take down Wall? Wall will just dunk on him. lol