Thursday Three-Pointer: Nov. 30, 2023

CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. -- The late start time might have made me a little crazy, but I couldn't stop thinking about Bum Phillips in the second half of Boston College's 18-point win over Vanderbilt on Wednesday night.

At a surface level, it makes no sense. Bum Phillips is about as far from Boston-based college basketball as anyone can get. He coached the Houston Oilers as a real-life caricature of a Texas-based football coach. He wore a giant cowboy hat on the sidelines unless he was at the Astrodome or some other domed stadium because his mother taught him to take his hat off indoors, and he walked the sidelines in jeans and cowboy boots with the occasional fur-lined coat. He was born and raised in Texas and coached football at every level … in Texas.

He was not, in a phrase, a Massachusetts-based college basketball coach.

He was, however, one of the best-quoted coaches in sports history, and one of his famous lines rang through my head in the second half of Wednesday's win in Nashville. It came from the late-1970s after Bum's Oilers lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers in consecutive trips to the AFC Championship Game, and it exemplified an attitude of continuing to beat a drum to get over a hump.

"One year ago, we knocked on the door," he said. "This year, we beat on the door. Next year, we're going to kick [it] in."

That quote - edited for cleanliness because this is a family show - reflected exactly how I felt about Thanksgiving week's run-up to BC's trip to Music City. Coming off of wins over Richmond and Harvard, the Eagles lost two straight the College Basketball Hall of Fame Classic in Kansas City. The first game felt like they could have beaten Colorado State if they played with a little bit different energy, and the next night - on Thanksgiving - was a game they gave away against Loyola Chicago.

All that was left was to actually win a high-profile game, and BC did that with gusto when it smoked past the Commodores on the final night of the inaugural ACC/SEC Challenge.

"We had a little bit of a slip or a setback or whatever you want to call it in Kansas City," said head coach Earl Grant on Wednesday night, "and we were very disappointed. We weren't very comfortable for three or four days, and we were a little uneasy. But the guys came in with good practices and showed good energy, and we talked about taking good shots and being sound and tougher defensively. We were able to come out and do something."

It's easy to forget how Vanderbilt advanced to the NIT as a No. 2 seed last year, and the opening game loss to Presbyterian set a tone that pushed away from memories of advancing to the postseason quarterfinals. A 40 percent shooting team overall, the Commodores shot the ball poorly against UNC Greensboro and Arizona State while improving against USC Upstate, Central Arkansas and NC State, but the team played better when landing three-pointers combined with an ability to get to the free throw line. Similar to BC, more inconsistent results then stemmed from whenever shots didn't consistently land from outside or when turnover numbers ran high.

It formed a very obvious nightmare scenario built around a combination of offensive and defensive struggles, and both reared their head when BC opened the game with a 17-5 run over the first seven minutes that staggered Vanderbilt onto its heels. The numbers then imploded, and by the end of the first half, a 7-for-25 shooting performance included six different shooters who combined for an 0-for-11 performance while two BC players - Quinten Post and Claudell Harris Jr. - combined for 28 first half points, outscoring Vandy (23) at the break.

"We weren't doing anything special," said Grant. "We were playing sound and were in a position of trying to pressure the ball at the pickup point. We wanted to pressure and contest shots, and we had elite communication. It was just all the things that we had been trying to do all year. We just did it better than we had to date."

The 21-point lead at halftime stayed at double digits for the rest of the game, and after padding the lead to 24 points, the Commodores went on a run that brought the game within 11 points in the waning minutes with an improved shooting clip from the outside.

"It's really hard to keep a 20-point lead," Grant said. "But it's two and a half weeks into the season and we're not at full maturity. We had a great first half, but it's hard to keep that lead. There's a natural tendency for a team that's down 20 points to come out and play free and fast, and they made a run. But we stabilized it with about four or five minutes to go, and we executed to shoot the lead back to 17. So I was proud of our guys' effort, and we took a step in the right direction."

Here's some more from a trip to Music City:

1) You can run on for a long time, run on for a long time.

Wednesday was BC's first game against the SEC since the 2020-21 season brought Florida to Connecticut for COVID-19's Bubbleville event at Mohegan Sun, and it ranked as the first win over the league since a Nik Popovic tip-in at the buzzer beat Bruce Pearl's Auburn Tigers at Madison Square Garden during the 2016-17 season. Somewhat ironically, this was actually the first time a BC team played a non-neutral site game against the SEC since Steve Donahue's last season in Chestnut Hill produced a ten-point loss at Auburn after 2018's scheduled game at Texas A&M was canceled due to mechanical issues and inclement weather made travel to College Station impossible.

Quinten Post was barely a teenager when that happened, but the future Eagle center experienced a minor homecoming on Wednesday when he walked into Memorial Gym. A former Mississippi State Bulldog before transferring to BC for Earl Grant's first season, the preseason All-ACC selection posted a game-high 24 points with seven rebounds, three blocks and an assist while playing with an edge reserved for a league that maybe didn't believe in his full potential when he was posting 10 minutes off the bench against the Commodores.

"When they announced that we were going to play the SEC, I was kind of hoping that we were going to draw Mississippi State," Post said. "I think with the ranking, it was actually possible to do that, but I was very excited to prove myself. I didn't have great success in the SEC. I was also young and in college basketball, it's harder - especially for a younger guy - to prove myself. To play well against an SEC school that I faced before felt really good."

Post entered Wednesday as the only player in the nation averaging 20.8 points, 9.2 rebounds, 2.7 assists and 2.1 blocks per game, and his numbers against Vandy continued his bid to become the fourth player in college basketball history with those stats across an entire season while single-handedly being on the floor for a net-positive of 12 points.

"Obviously when you're his size and can hit threes, people will respect the three," Grant said, "He's got free reign. He's been with me since Day One and I haven't coached a game without him on the roster, so he's got the green light. We've got confidence in him, and he's worked at it because you have to use that as a threat."

2) There's no stopping me once I get goin', put a can in my hand and I'm wide open.

The flow offense is designed to open different shooters by running the ball through the high post, but moving over 30 percent of the offense through Post illustrated the difficulty in defending the Eagles when they understand how to pass in and out of its traffic. Post's ability to shoot from outside separately opened Jaeden Zackery's ability to dish out eight assists, and after both Post and Harris got going in the first half, Zackery went to work in the second half with double-digit scoring and an ability to both drive for shots and draw contact.

"We had a committee effort," Grant said. "Both him and Quinten Post scored in the 20s, and we had other guys right at 10. So it was a committee effort, but that's what Harris is capable of. We have to continue to try to help him grow in our program and have the confidence to be an offensive threat because he's tough on defense at the same time. I think he's doing some good things for us, and we're going to continue to try to build him up."

Moving the ball in and out of the interior of the offense is a relatively new concept for BC, and Wednesday's breakout negated and erased the struggles from last week when Colorado State trapped Post in the low post. It more specifically got a second shooter involved on the perimeter, and Harris drained a couple of open shots by simply taking hand-off dribbles from Zackery that set picks against chasing defenders.

Vanderbilt eventually adjusted to it in the second half, but doubling down on the high-ball screens left Mason Madsen wide open for a game-breaking 3-pointer that ended the Commodores' comeback bid in the last 90 seconds.

"The energy goes throughout the whole team," Harris said. "The whole team feels involved, and we needed the offensive rebounds that Elijah had with the tip-in at the buzzer of the first half even though we were up by 19 or 21. It's all about momentum, and it's a momentum game."

3) Cussin' and complainin' weren't allowed in Mawmaw's house.

My last - and, to date, only - trip to Nashville happened right before the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, but Vanderbilt and the greater Nashville area holds a special place in my family because it was the last place we visited before the pandemic and the subsequent births of our two children. I was also in Nashville - more specifically, I was walking outside the baseball stadium - when I found out about Kobe Bryant's death, and I still remember the surreality of watching music at a Broadway honkytonk music bar while the televisions were glued to ongoing coverage.

I loved the entire city experience, and Midtown Nashville's surrounding area around Vanderbilt was a great escape from the neon lights and noise of the Broadway area. Regrettably, I never walked into Memorial Gym, but I'd long known about the atmosphere and experience of an arena where the empty floor space around the court gives off one of college basketball's unique vibes.

"I actually enjoyed it," said Grant of coaching at Vanderbilt. "I didn't know that I would like it, but there were two places where I always said I wanted to coach: Minnesota and Vanderbilt. It's so different, and I never coached there or played a game there. I was wondering how we would feel about it, but I actually enjoyed it."

Memorial Gym was built at a time in the 1950s when basketball courts were elevated onto platforms in the middle of the arena. The lifted look doesn't allow for much to be built onto the floor space itself, so the amount of empty space around the perimeter hones the attention directly and solely onto the playing surface while necessitating bench placements beyond the baselines.

The uniqued setup forced coaches to stand under their own baskets until the addition of sideline coaching boxes in 2016, but it doesn't change the difficulties in having assistant coaches located down the end of the court with the benches, nor does it alter the substitutions that need to climb onto the platform before checking into the game.

"I played there before," said Post, "but it was during COVID. So the bench was underneath the basket and was even more spread out. To experience it again was cool. I think it adds another dimension."

Post-Game Huddle: Heads Carolina, Tails California

I've been unreasonably excited for the start of conference play this year. I can't exactly put my finger on it, but I'm not sold on the experts' analysis on the ACC being a down conference this year when the top nine conference teams in the KenPom rankings are all within the top-75.

The numbers are lower than the Big 12 and the SEC, but the ACC just tied the SEC in the inaugural ACC-SEC Challenge by utilizing wins from Boston College, Virginia, Wake Forest, Georgia Tech and Syracuse. None of those teams were ranked, and for what it's worth, the Cavaliers' win was over a Texas A&M team that's among some of the nation's strongest teams. I love the parity and structure within the ACC this year, and I especially like how the schedule pits closely-regarded teams against one another for early league games.

Take the BC-NC State game on Saturday, for example. The Eagles are just inside the top-100 in both the KenPom and Torvik ranking systems and facing a Wolfpack team that's regarded as a bubble tournament team after the first six games of the season. For both teams, a win is incredibly important to the early conference season spheres of influence. It's critical for teams like the Pack to split the line between the middle and bottom of the league to avoid being caught in a blurry situation, but it's equally urgent for BC to continue blurring the lines by jumping into that next tier. That both teams are playing one another to open the ACC schedule is an example of how this league fights to the middle, and that middle is still very, very good - regardless of what the experts say on a weekly basis.

Saturday's game kicks off the ACC slate before the Eagles jump back into non-conference play next week, and it can be seen on the ACC Network with tip-off time at 4 p.m. Online streaming is available through the ESPN platform of web-based and mobile devices with radio broadcast available through the BC IMG Learfield Sports Radio Network, locally in Boston on WEEI 850 AM.

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