Brian: On Saturday, the Eagles hoops team held on for an all-important victory over Virginia Tech, 58-56. The win gets the Eagles to 15-8 and more importantly, stops a three-game losing streak in conference. BC has seven games left in the regular season -- three home, four on the road -- and needs to string together a few more wins to get off this year's very soft tournament bubble.
Let's start with the Eagles' defense. BC's defense has been downright terrible for most of the year, but came up big on Saturday, limiting the Hokies to a season low 34.5 FG percentage (20-for-58). Donahue said he tried to simplify the defense, sticking to man-to-man over the 1-3-1 and 2-3 zone looks the team has been using:
"We really set our defense, we worried about floor balance a little more and made sure that we had our defenses set," he said. "I didn't change defenses as much. I just thought we could focus in on one thing and let this group do that, and I thought they did a good job of it."
Were you impressed with the Eagles defense on Saturday? Do you expect Donahue to stay mostly in man-to-man the rest of the way? Can BC afford to stay in a man defense when they go up against teams like Clemson, Maryland and North Carolina?
Jeff: I was very impressed. Well, very impressed since the team managed to really lower my expectations after the North Carolina performance. I didn't think BC would hold another ACC team in the 50's the rest of the season aside from maybe Wake Forest. It was great to see that BC could get a conference win without just outshooting the opponent.
Brian: Reggie Jackson continued his shooting slump, going scoreless for nearly three-quarters of the game before finishing with 10 points -- all in the game's final 11:07. Jackson hit what proved to be the game-winning shot with just 1:09 left to play. Do you think Jackson is coming out of his shooting slump, or do you expect Reggie's shooting woes to continue?
Jeff: I don't think the end of the game was any indication of Reggie turning the corner again. He did the same type of thing towards the end of the Duke game. He really couldn't do much for the whole game and then finally started showing signs of his old self once the game was out of reach. If it is going to continue to take him 30 minutes to warm up, we're in trouble. We don't need him to be the team MVP in order to get into the NCAA tournament, but we do need him to score a little more and create scoring opportunities for others. Unfortunately, at Clemson on Tuesday night is not the most likely place to come out of a slump. We can hope, but I just don't see it happening. I think we're going to have to find a way to win with Reggie scoring less than 15.