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No one said that this season would be easy for Lipscomb.
A year removed from the school’s best season ever, in which they finished as the NIT Runner-Up and sported a 29-8 record, the Bisons are missing many pieces from the team that made history. Garrison Mathews, Rob Marberry, and Kenny Cooper, the three leading scorers from that team are gone. Additionally, they lost their head coach, Casey Alexander, to the Belmont Bruins, a team only a handful of miles down the road.
Thus, the 2019-20 campaign has gone about how one would expect. Therefore, no one was really surprised when they traveled to Pittsburgh and fell to a Duquesne team that could surprise some people in the A-10. Yet, when digging into the backstory of this game, it becomes clear that the Bisons and Dukes faced off in one of the ugliest and strangest games you’ll ever see.
When I got home last night, my dumb brain forced me to do what it always does, which is check to see if any really good mid-major upsets happened while I was out living my otherwise-normal life.
The Lipscomb-Duquesne score instantly caught my eye because it looked like something went horribly wrong there:
what the hell happened here pic.twitter.com/KlzRuAgfEa
— Cameron Newton (@morrisoncrying) November 16, 2019
One of my followers then pointed out something quite interesting:
Was at game... Duquesne was getting their stadium redone, so they held game at a D3 college. Rims had no give, I’m still wondering if they were regulation.
— Daniel Dennison (@daniel_dennison) November 16, 2019
I did some research, and Daniel is right—the game was played at the Kerr Fitness Center, which is on the campus of La Roche University, a D-III school that’s also located in Pittsburgh.
While I can neither confirm nor deny Daniel’s rim-related conspiracy theory, I can’t blame him for creating it in the first place, as last night’s matchup featured some of the most heinous perimeter shooting I’ve ever heard of.
Lipscomb went 0-18 from three.
Duquesne went 1-22.
That combines for 1-40. Put another way, 2.5% of all threes taken yesterday went from the shooter’s hands and into the rim and out through the bottom of the net.
The situation was so bleak that, when the first three-pointer finally went down, the announcers borrowed a line from President Gerald Ford speaking after his predecessor resigned the presidency in the midst of Watergate:
"Our long national nightmare is over!" Dukes FINALLY hit a three! pic.twitter.com/sMfok9ioyo
— A10 Talk (@A10Talk) November 16, 2019
Just to make matters worse, here’s the shot chart from beyond the arc.
"Our long national nightmare is over." Duquesne and Lipscomb just combined to go 1-for-40 from three. The shot chart, probably. pic.twitter.com/12JzTAnFr6
— SBUnfurled (@SBUnfurled) November 16, 2019
The verdict? It’s bad!!
We will probably never be forgiven for memorializing this game, but it’s important that posterity know what transpired last evening. This was a mess.