Caldwell had a nice class lined up, but poached one to LSU with her and another just straight decommitted. We’re hurting pretty bad for guards right now (sound familiar?), down to a rotation of Mariah Williams, who has improved since last year but has now been thrust into a larger role (with 31 min against Baylor), Thea Lemberger, who has skills but needs to learn to defend without fouling, and Moriah Faulk, who I was pretty happy with at Baylor, but is still a freshman. Next year’s class should include three (quantity) four- and five-star recruits at guard to make up for this lack of depth.

Another stat to look at (having not watched the game myself) is fouls and foul shots. In the first half, Baylor shot four FTs; in the second half, they shot 32. Between giving up ~30 points at the charity stripe and our not-particularly-deep roster accruing that many fouls, there was no way the second half could have ended well. I don’t know what exactly happened to warrant that many fouls, or whether they were bullshit or not, but I was struck by the contrast between the halves. Did we get tired and start fouling? Maybe. Was this the “playing the top-5 team” effect (cf. games vs. Stanford last year and Nebraska the year before where they both got away with murder because “well, they’re good. they don’t have to foul, so they clearly didn’t!”)? No idea, but the fact is that we don’t have enough players (nevermind players of the caliber to hang with Baylor) to handle that much foul trouble. That may well have been completely our fault for actually committing that many fouls, but from my experience watching us play top-5 teams over the years, I’d probably say that a few were bullshit— at least enough to put us in more foul trouble than we deserved.

Quite frankly, I’m suprised that this bruised and battered roster could hang with Baylor through the first half, and that is absolutely not a moral victory- that’s just fact. On paper, this game should have been over five minutes in. Expecting this team, with only one (two, maybe?) returning uninjured starters, to hang with the number one team in the nation this early in the season is unrealistic. We were in a great spot at the end of last year, but then we lost Darxia Morris and Doreena Campbell to graduation, and we lost Markel Walker and Jasmine Dixon to injury. Just for perspective, at the end of last season, these four players accounted for 47/55 points against Stanford, 39/55 against Montana, and 52/75 against Gonzaga. Maybe if we’d had Walker and Dixon, we could have kept Baylor a game through the second half, but this team as it stands did well.

This is not Karl Dorrell style “the cupboard is bare,” but on the other hand, this program is not in as great shape as a lot of people seem to believe, and for the record, most of it is not Nikki Caldwell’s fault. Yeah, we could have recruited a few more guards, but most of the issues I see stem from injuries, which could not be foreseen (as opposed to having played two senior guards heavily).