One of the best rebounding teams in the country played SEC football against an inexperienced Atlantic 10 team playing basketball.   Football beat basketball 75-50 in a game that was never in doubt.   Mississippi St shot 59% from the floor and dominated the backboards (39-24 rebounding advantage), while holding SLU to 25% from the three-point line and 41% True Shooting Percentage.

Lineups

In this space, we try and discern what Jim “Safecracker” Crews is seeing and hearing, as he turns the dials on different combinations to see what will click.

Starters:

• Austin McBroom
• Ash Yacoubou
• Davell Roby
• Tanner Lancona
• John Manning

Back to the starting lineup from the first two games, perhaps due to Lancona and Manning showing signs of life defensively vs NC A&T.

Minutes Leaders (non-starters in Bold):

• McBroom (27)
• Yarbrough (22)
• Bartley (22)
• Yacoubou (17)
• Agbeko (17)

Hard to get a read on anything here, as the minutes were distributed relatively evenly in a game featuring zero Crunch Time and heaping helpings of Garbage Time.

SLU Player Stats

(Definitions at bottom of post)

• Reggie Agbeko had a plus game overall; like the rest of the SLU team he was bulldogged on the glass
• Everyone else was overmatched

Summary

SLUs first game against a Top 100 team (MSU was #85 on KenPom.com going in) states emphatically the Billikens are not yet ready for such competition.  Looking ahead, this trio of upcoming games stands out as comparable to MSU:

• 12/21: Vermont (#103)
• 12/31: Vanderbilt (#99)
• 1/3: Rhode Island (#87)

Pomeroy currently has SLU winning all three of these home games each by a point.  December should reveal the range of possiblilties in the A-10 season to come.

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AdjGS:  variation on the Game Score metric created by John Hollinger, detailed here.  Hollinger’s original formula is Adjusted to reallocate the points in the game by ratio of the player’s overall impact.  Credit to the team at Rock M Nation for this improvement.