MEMPHIS, Tenn. – The Mustang Band and cheerleaders showed up to the team hotel an hour and a half before SMU’s Conference USA tournament game Wednesday afternoon. While the band played “Peruna” repeatedly as the team boarded its bus, it might as well have been playing a funeral march.
It’s been that type of year for the Mustangs.
SMU’s season ended in a way that shouldn’t surprise anyone who has watched the team all year. The opposing teams were interchangeable, but the Mustangs were disappointingly consistent. It goes like this:
SMU falls behind early, slowly comes back, hangs around until the end of the game and then fails to make the necessary shots to win.
“At the end of the day, the ball has to go in the hoop,” head coach Matt Doherty said after the 59-52 loss to Southern Miss.
For the second time this year, the Mustangs played the Golden Eagles but did not have the shots to pull out a close win.
More specifically, free throws cost SMU a chance to advance.
The Mustangs went 8 of 15 from the free-throw line – 53 percent. What the statistic doesn’t tell you is how many free throws were missed at the front end of a one and one. Four times SMU never even had a second free-throw attempt. Four free throws missed and four that were never attempted.
This SMU team just did not have the players necessary to win. SMU didn’t do much winning in Conference USA, but hopefully they learned that it shouldn’t be that hard to improve.
C-USA is a mediocre basketball conference. Memphis is the big cat and everyone else is mired in a sea of so-so talent. SMU has been at the bottom of that sea since they joined the league two years ago.
This status was reinforced in the tournament program sold at the FedEx Forum. Each team page had a “Great Moment.” SMU’s was the groundbreaking of the Crum Basketball Center, the practice facility set to open this October.
The program was a reminder that SMU is not a program of now, it is (rather frustratingly) a program of the future.
Before the Memphis game on Saturday, it was a very safe bet that SMU would be one and done at the conference tournament. But after the out-of-body play by the Mustangs, it seemed like the team was poised to make some noise.
It turns out it was just false signs of life.
