STARKVILLE — Another loss, another positive comment for the Mississippi State women’s basketball team.
Unfortunately, the comments the Lady Bulldogs are earning won’t improve their record or they chances to keep their season alive after the Southeastern Conference tournament.
MSU (14-12, 4-9 SEC) will try to rectify that problem at 2 p.m. today when it plays the University of Arkansas (19-6, 8-5) at Bud Walton Arena in Fayetteville, Ark.
MSU is coming off a 57-41 loss to No. 13 University of Tennessee on Thursday in Starkville. Following the game. Tennessee associated head coach Holly Warlick praised the Lady Bulldogs for their energy and defense. MSU’s effort held Tennessee to its lowest scoring total in the 33-game series history. The flip side, though, was the Lady Bulldogs shot a season-low 23.2 percent (16 of 69) from the field and failed to earn their first victory in program history against the Lady Volunteers.
“Their defense was pretty solid and it was physical,” Warlick said. “It is a credit to them on how we played in the first half. They made us rush and we didn’t get the shots we wanted.”
MSU coach Sharon Fanning-Otis doesn’t take any solace in the fact numerous SEC coaches have praised facets of her team’s play. She, too, praised the Lady Bulldogs’ defense and their execution in getting shots in their half-court offense. The troubling part was MSU made only five field goals in the first 20 minutes and failed to capitalize on an opportunity to build a lead against a ranked team.
“You have to be able to play for an extended period of time,” Fanning-Otis said. “They rotate 11 people. We just did not come up with a couple of possessions you have to have defensively and to score.”
Fanning-Otis said the Lady Bulldogs have to have better focus if they are going to break a cycle of close losses. She said the players need to have an “attack mentality” that helps them read their teammates better and to anticipate lulls in the play so they can lift their energy to break out of that drought.
Despite the loss, MSU senior point guard Diamber Johnson struck a positive tone. She said everyone on the team still believes the Lady Bulldogs have what it takes to win four games in four days to win the SEC tournament, which will be March 1-4 in Nashville, Tenn.
Entering today’s action, MSU is in ninth place in the league with regular-season games remaining at the University of Florida (Thursday) and against No. 7 University of Kentucky (12:30 p.m., Feb. 26).
“We were ready to come out here and play today,” Johnson said. “When we got tired, that is when things started to go downhill for us.”
Warlick also likes a lot of what she sees in MSU. While she wouldn’t like to see MSU make a run and win the SEC title, she said the Lady Bulldogs do a lot of things that cause problems for opponents.
“They’re an athletic team and very well coached,” Warlick said. “We knew we had to bring our ‘A’ game, and we didn’t. We had 13 turnovers in the first half, and that is a credit to them.
“They have a nice team, and they play hard.”
MSU lost to Arkansas 51-35 on Jan. 26 in Starkville. The Lady Bulldogs hit a season-low 13 field goals and shot 25.5 percent in that loss. Johnson was 1 of 10 from the field in the game after spending most of the day with her mother, Adella, who had a heart attack earlier that day.
Arkansas had its eight-game SEC winning streak snapped Thursday in a 50-42 loss to LSU.
Adam Minichino is the former Sports Editor for The Commercial Dispatch.
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