Hello Ohio!

Welcome to the round of 32!  Just giving you a quick scouting report on USF just in case you haven't seen us play.

I know a few of you have traded back and forth comments between our boards, but I'm coming here attempting to be as neutral as possible :)

Offensively, we've been known to go on very dry spells and have been lauded for the lack of production sometimes.  It's haunted us a few times in the season.  Last night against Temple, we went 22 straight attempts without a net.  Something came alive last night and we down in Tampa were all remarkably surprised.  In addition, it happened in the Cal game as well -- most would agree we're playing the best offensively as we are all season (well, minus the first 20 minutes of yesterdays game) :)

Defensively, I'm sure you've heard right now, we're pretty stellar.  Held the last 12 opponents to under 60 points and lead the Big East in overall.  Not getting ahead of myself, but we've been known to have many complimentary adjectives thrown our way in regards to our defense (Lville's Rick Pitino compared us to a Root Canal)

Anthony Collins, our freshman PG has been producing a lot of offense lately.  He's quite speedy and agile and makes his way to the paint with ease.  He's been getting a lot of credit lately for his work.  Excellent at the line as well

We have a few outside shooters that can hit the 3-ball, Fitzpatrick and Rudd, but of course, it goes without saying that as much as we push our defense, sometimes our offense can't quite match up basket-to-basket with opposition. 

Perhaps our achilles heel is our turnovers.  We have a tendency to play really sloppy ball, and sometimes that hurts us in the endgame.  Limiting turnovers is something we have to rely on to be successful.

The tempo of USF's game goes very slow, hence our low scoring affairs.  Many teams say it wears the starters down (which happened in Cal's case). 

I wish you guys luck on Sunday, I know it'll be a great matchup.  Any info you wish to share is more than welcome!  Congrats again and GO BULLS! :)

Is it a long haul for you guys to head over to Nashville?  I pegged you on google maps a little over 7 hours.

I heard there were a good hundred of us Bulls fans up there -- bigger the crowd the better!

Turnovers have hurt us as have "brain cramps" for lack of a better term.

We play very hard on defense and rebound well.  In the BE tournament we got knocked out after a series of bad decisions.  Hopefully we learned from those.  Still, though, I saw in the game vs. Temple last night we did some of the same. 

I haven't been able to see any Ohio action this season.  I was looking at news reports to get some idea about the Bobcats and will read more here.