Exhibition games aren’t meant to matter much in the grand scheme of things.
In general, they exist primarily to give players an extra set of practices, for coaches to try and iron out their system one last time before the beginning of the regular season (or in some cases, after the opening game against a non-D1 opponent), and if the scheduling is such, allow schools from below Division I a chance to visit larger facilities which nowadays only seems to be done by one-bid leagues during the non-conference portion of the schedule. So, why would I watch IU Indy play Austin Peay in an otherwise pointless exhibition instead of, say, the World Series?
- I’m following this team so I need to see what players Ben Howlett brought in will be effective as this is essentially a brand-new squad, primarily of D2 transfers and players from various Division I schools on the portal. Only two players from last year’s team (Kameron Tinsley and Reece Hagy) remain, and it’ll be seen if their experience will warrant an upgrade on the roster, or if Howlett won’t play favorites and instead prioritize skill and adaptability towards the System. Sure, an exhibition game doesn’t look practical for the casual viewer, but for someone like me, this is vital information as I need to know the players that are going to be important moving forward. Heck, who will be contenders for Horizon League Third Team?
- … I spent $40 on this ESPN and Fox One combo subscription, and damn it; I am going to use this thing to watch ESPN+ games that only 3 people and their pets will be paying attention to because they offered those. Besides, when you try and watch games through… less than legitimate means, you should not be surprised when Horizon League games rank very low on streamer priorities. As much as I don’t like the idea of paying for services that inevitably jack up their rates, it is a godsend to have access to games from lower-tier conferences.
For the Jaguars in their exhibition efforts, Gus Etchison led the Jaguars with 26 points. Being the “veterans” on the roster, Tinsley and Hagy started for the Jaguars, although Hagy managed to have more staying power during the exhibition, scoring 16 points off five made attempts out of seven and was a perfect six out of six from the charity stripe. Jason Clarke Jr. and Markus Pastorcic-Straun were the other Jaguars to see double-digits in the loss.
The Jaguars started this game with a four-point lead, although this wasn’t built to last as the Governors’ Zyree Collins, who led both teams with 32 points, would hit a three and get two additional free throws after being fouled. Both teams would clumsily trade the lead back and forth throughout the game, with the largest lead being the Governors’ 7-point lead towards the end of the game, which the Jaguars would make an effort to fight back from. And I do mean clumsily with regards to both IU Indy and Austin Peay; both teams had a combined 38 turnovers, and only Austin Peay was above 40% in three-point shooting which you can argue was due to a more conservative game.
That said, I have to give a big thumbs down to the officiating. It took the officials at least ten minutes (which if you watch the ESPN+ replay would be truncated due to commercial breaks) to verify a backcourt violation of Austin Peay’s Rashaud Marshall colliding with Hagy in the first half that, in fairness, has all of the tact and veracity of the found Bigfoot footage. Then, at the very end of the game, when Felipe Minzer dives onto the ball, it takes a moment for the crew to determine IU Indy possession… only for that to be negated when Etchison unfortunately stumbles out of bounds, ensuring the Jaguars’ defeat.
Random Thoughts:
*Austin Peay joined a “new” conference this year… well, “new” in the sense that they did redecorating; the United Athletic Conference. The United Athletic Conference is the rebranding of the long-standing Western Athletic Conference, a conference that existed for decades as the conference that housed schools that weren’t exactly Pac-10 material but were on the western part of the United States and played football, only to get ravaged by football realignment in the early 2000s when most of the top programs decided to split off to form the Mountain West Conference and the WAC struggled to survive as a result, before ultimately becoming used as a ploy for a few Texas-based schools that did not want to settle as Southland Conference afterthoughts. The UAC originally had ambitions of being an FCS-only football conference that would seek an FBS upgrade, but those goals fell apart quickly as schools like Sam Houston and Jacksonville State would go up to FCS on their own, leading to that version of the UAC to align with the Atlantic Sun in an attempt to stay solvent. Confused? So am I. Then, the WAC rebranded entirely as the UAC and split off it’s football schools from the Atlantic Sun while maintaining operations with the ASUN, which remains its own conference of non-football schools (except for one that plays football *in* the UAC). College sports is gonna be cannibalized at the top thanks to football, but it’s also gonna be cannibalized at the bottom as conferences will do their damndest to build whatever fiefdoms they still can.
*Coaches invariably do not play true freshmen unless it is absolutely necessary, so Kaloyan Kolov and Trey Drexler are probably going to be shut down before Horizon League play starts… but at least they got one second of action in before the end of the first half, which was rather unusual if you look at the stat sheet. Landon Osswald was the only Jaguar to not see the court.
*Thankfully, it’s an exhibition game. But, losing by falling out of bounds is always one of those ways of losing that just… get to you, so I’m hoping that Etchison simply forgets about this because he’s clearly our best player, albeit based on a small sampling size.
Anyway, the curtain rises on a new era of IU Indianapolis this Monday morning as the school finally has its own arena to call its own as the Jaguars host Miami of Ohio… Middletown.
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