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What do you say to that? What do you do to try and forget that? I am not sure that even the machine from The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind could help erase the memories of a defeat this bad.
This crawls inside your head and will have Zeke Marshall sitting up in his bed with cold sweats until he signs a pro contract somewhere... and even then this might still haunt him.
This is the kind of loss that crawls inside your skin and gives you a rash that never goes away.
If you haven't heard by now, Virginia Commonwealth took it to Akron with its havoc defense, and blew the Zips out of the Auburn Hills gym, 88-42.
Yeah, they more than doubled up on the MAC Champs.
Does anyone remember when this Zips team was ranked in the Coaches Poll this season? Remember when this Zips team was poised to run through the MAC without a blemish? No, you don't. BECAUSE YOU CAN'T ERASE THE PICTURES IN YOUR HEAD OF THIS MESS.
Sure there was an arrest of maybe the most important player for the Zips against VCU. The loss of Abreu meant a major gap in ball handling skills.
Then you had Brian Walsh and Pat Forsythe getting sick. I don't think the performance of their team on the floor made them feel any better.
How bad was this?
Read:
Shaka Smart just beat his best friend by 46 pts. I'd hate to see what he'd do to someone he doesn't like.
— Jerry Beach (@defiantlydutch) March 22, 2013
Read:
Incredible CBS stat: Akron lost by 49 combined points in their 6 other losses. Lost by 46 tonight.
— Hustle Belt (@HustleBelt) March 22, 2013
Read:
Just saw this on another feed: Akron-VCU score looks like a Celcius-to-Farenheit conversion.
— Dennis Dodd (@dennisdoddcbs) March 22, 2013
Yeah, it was that bad.
Akron's "One Shining Moment" Appearance at the end of this thing is either going to be them coming out of the locker room, when maybe they could smile, or the final buzzer because this was mercifully over.
That is not to say that some Zip players didn't have OK games. Demetrius Treadwell, who was one of the players that we thought would be important for Akron against the Rams, had 15 points and seven rebounds. Marshall added four more blocks to his career total, and scored 11 points in his final game.
But that is where the fun ends. Akron had 21 turnovers; got dominated on the boards by the Rams, especially when it came to giving VCU second-chance points; and Carmelo Betancourt had just four assists... to his five turnovers.
Heck, I just wrote almost 500 words on this game, and I am still speechless. This was a team that at one point this season looked like it could be this Ohio of the 2013 NCAA Tournament.
Yeah, that didn't happen. No, no, no it didn't.
*sigh*