NC State football may have a monster game tomorrow against Wake Forest, but tonight basketball will take center stage tonight the 2014 – 2015 version of Wolfpack hoops hits the hardwood for a regular season match up with Jackson State. And, don’t forget that PNC Arena will be rocking a new floor design tonight and throughout the season! (Click here)
As has been Mark Gottfried’s philosophy since arriving in Raleigh, the Wolfpack’s nonconference schedule is again very formidable this year. But tonight’s game is not expected to be one of the tough ones as (linked here) you will see Jackson State at #310 of 351 Division One college basketball teams.
You can click here and click here if for some reason you want to jump deeper into previews of Jackson State.
With some of these smaller D-I basketball programs, it sometimes seems like they turn over an entire roster from one season to the next. Almost half of Jackson State’s borderline-excessive 18-man roster is new for the 2014-15 season, one obvious sign of a program with a second-year coach in full rebuilding mode.
The Tigers finished last year 11-20 (7-11), which was only good enough for seventh in the 10-team SWAC; the program has not had a winning season since 2011. They bottomed out in 2012 with a seven-win campaign that somehow did not cost ninth-year head coach Tevester Anderson his job. The following season did, though.
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In addition to the weak two-point shooting, the Tigers were also poor from beyond the arc, where they shot 29.3%. They were one of the least-frequent three-point shooting teams in the nation (way to recognize your limitations, fellas!), so they were getting very little to speak of from the ol’ bonusphere.
There is no indication from their exhibition games that they are suddenly shifting into a three-heavy offense heading into 2015. Oh, and another thing: one of those exhibition games was against Tougaloo College, a tiny private school that plays at the NAIA level. Jackson State lost by 21.
We haven’t spent too much time on preseason prognostications simply because there will be plenty of time in this early part of the season to merge the preseason hype with what we are seeing on the court…but, we’ll start to dive deeper into basketball in the days to come! In the meantime, we highly encourage you to keep up with a whole host of individual topic in real time by clicking here.
