|
 |   |
|
EVENTS Fantasy Central Inside Game Multimedia Central Statitudes Your Turn Message Boards Email Newsletters Golf Guide Cities Work in Sports
CNNSI.com GROUP
COMMERCE |  |
The run through 'Murderer's Row'
Posted: Wednesday January 26, 2000 12:14 PM
Andy Landers, a three-time National Coach of the Year, is in his 21st season at Georgia. Landers has averaged 24.3 wins a year, third-best among all active Division I coaches with as much tenure. The Lady Bulldogs are one of only four teams to reach the NCAA Final Four five times. Georgia is 19-2 and ranked No. 3 in the nation. Check out Landers' diary every other week on CNNSI.com.
January 26, 2000
What an incredible two weeks! Beginning on January 9, we continued our Southeastern Conference play with a game on FOX Sports Net South against Alabama. While we did not play our best, we were good enough to beat a good Alabama team on the road. Then, on Thursday of that week we traveled to Florida, built a 16-point lead in the second half against the Gators, and came away with our second conference win of the year. At Florida, I felt our team defense was starting to click; in fact, I thought it was becoming the strength I had hoped for all season. We continued to emphasize defensive play in practice as we prepared for Tennessee in a nationally televised game (ESPN2) on Martin Luther King Day, Monday, January 17. I was right; our defense has started to mature as our team played spectacularly all afternoon in the showdown of two teams that have aspirations of winning both the conference and national titles. We handed Tennessee a 78-51 loss in front of a sell-out crowd of 10,524 people. The arena was electric, the atmosphere was incredible, and the play of our team was marvelous. Deana "Tweety" Nolan was the star of the show. She had a tremendous afternoon, both defensively and offensively. With some excellent decisions and spectacular offensive moves, she is starting to show the consistency I had hoped for before the season. This consistency carried over to Thursday when we played our in-state rival Georgia Tech at a sold-out Cobb Civic Center. Again, our team played very well defensively and displayed poise for much of the evening on the offensive end of the floor. But the two-week period wasn't over. A two-week period that would include games on the road at Alabama, Florida, Georgia Tech and Auburn on the road, and Tennessee at home and which we had dubbed "Murderer's Row". Our staff talked with the team prior to the beginning of this two-week period and told them we felt that coming out this two weeks we would know what kind of basketball team we had now and could ultimately become.
This past Sunday afternoon, January 23, we visited 10th-ranked Auburn, again on FOX Sports Net South. I felt the match-ups against Auburn had the potential to be more difficult than the match-up against Tennessee. Auburn is an extremely athletic and talented team that reminds me a great deal of their late-80's teams that advanced to the Final Four. I would not be surprised to see them again make that kind of run in the NCAA Tournament. Offensively, to begin the game, our team was terrific. We had great ball movement, found the open man, and knocked down all the jump shots to build a big lead early that we basically nursed throughout the afternoon. However, once again defense was the key. It's great to have come off the two-run with four wins, but now the question becomes "Will we let down?". My thoughts are to make sure the team understands exactly where we are now. To be somewhat precise, we are little over a third of the way through the Southeastern Conference schedule. In this league, the sense would be that you are nowhere. We have too many tough games ahead of us to celebrate what we have already done. We play a 14-game Southeastern Conference schedule, so the short-term objective becomes to get to the halfway point of the season 6-1. Presently, we are 4-1, with games vs. Ole Miss and Vanderbilt coming up on the road. The amazing thing about our schedule this year is, after completing the upcoming weekend we will have played 23 games. Only five of those games have been at home. Hopefully, we can go into February with a 6-1 Southeastern Conference record, and enjoy a few more comforts of home as we close the season out in February. It is interesting to look across the country and see how everyone else is doing. Three of the top seven teams in the country were upset last week, and I think we'll see this happen again before the season is over. At this point, Connecticut is clearly the best team in the country; however, as Louisiana Tech quietly plays its way through its conference schedule, let us not forget how dangerous they can be. After those two teams it seems there are six or seven of us who are tightly grouped, but we also see marked improvement in some of the other teams, and if this continues the tournament promises to be truly mad in March.
-- Coach Landers
| ||||||||||||||||||||||
