Posts: 8,441
Threads: 751
Joined: Dec 1969
03-31-2019, 04:11 AM
(This post was last modified: 03-31-2019, 04:51 AM by
81alum.)
Here is the full context of Tara's remarks about Smith:
ALANNA SMITH: I would say that, yes, we have experienced shooting trouble. Probably not to the extent that it was like tonight. Usually we'll start off a little not great in the first half and then pick it up in the second, but it persisted the whole game. Honestly, I think the feeling on the team was we weren't worried. We know that we can hit down those shots,and we weren't today, so we had to go to something else.And I think Tara said it, you could just tell that we stayed with things, no matter what our percentage was. No one was freaking out, and I think that was really good on part of everybody on our team because we kept each other accountable, we kept each other in the game.
...
TARA VANDERVEER: That was an absolute root canal. You know, again, I think that there are some real positive things that came out of that. I thought we worked really hard on defense, to hold a team as talented as they are to 46 points, and we've really hung our hat on our defense, and today we actually -- we got on the glass a little bit better. We out-rebounded them, and I have never seen -- I can't ever remember a Stanford team that has struggled so much from the field, not just threes, but lay-ups, you know. And to move on to the Elite 8 with a game like that, I'm so glad that's not our last game because I really believe we're a lot better than that. But it was -- I was not sure what Alanna wasn't worried about. I don't know what game she was at. I mean, wow. We just --we tried a lot of different things. We tried a lot of different people, and we struggled. But it was -- we found a way to win, which is -- this is March, and it's survive and advance.
As our ugly win soaks in, I've been absorbing that really bad announcing. On the one had, they were obviously rooting for the Cinderella team. But part of their being bad was not just their bias but also not keeping us well informed about the game. For example, they did keep us informed about Smith's foul trouble, but I lost track of Carrington's foul trouble which also had an impact. For some reason I did not realize she had 4 fouls until looking at the box score, and she also had 2 of them in the first half. So 2 of our big 3 were in foul trouble and the 3rd went 0 for 11.
And did any of you notice that Andy Landers couldn't pronounce DiJonai's name? I've kind of like Landers in the past, and certainly prefer him as an announcer to the coach who beat us in the sweet 16 in 2013. But he was given a script to read and didn't have the foggiest idea how to pronounce the name, which tells me he hadn't watched a single Stanford game this year.