Gulf Coast Classic

The whole tournament was a coulda-shoulda type thing. The loss to Murray State was painful, and the loss to Duquesne was infuriating, but it's not hard to say that we were a handful of points away from winning all three games. Obviously had we won either of the first two we would have had different opponents, but they played well enough to win - and I don't think they played particularly well in any of the three games.

It was clear before the season that post depth was going to be the biggest problem for us, but the GCS showed us just how bad. The Prahl twins were practically invisible again, with Alex playing one minute and Brett playing 17. Here's Brett's lines:

MSU - 2 points, 2 rebounds, 3 fouls, 7 minutes
DUQ - 0 points, 2 rebounds, 1 foul, 9 minutes
CMU - 1 foul, 1 minute

The Panthers need - NEED - more production out of Brett Prahl specifically. They need him to average 10 mpg and hopefully 15 mpg, and he hasn't been able to give Rob Jeter any reason to keep him on the floor.

The other option - and one I don't like because it will hurt how deep we can go down the road - is to move Springs to a defensive 4 spot, since he is good at rebounding and it would allow us to play defense. It's not ideal, but it might be how we get through much of the conference season when we don't have to deal with big teams.

What we need to do is start blowing teams out - just start beating them down, and beating them down hard and early - so we can get Prahl in the game without stakes. He probably should have played 20 minutes against Trinity and we still have the Judson game in two weeks that he can play a lot in.

His value right now is that he can spell someone for five minutes, and can be the foul-taking enforcer. That's about it. That should be Alex's role - we need more out of Brett. The development just isn't there.

It's not over - far from it - but we don't need Brett to be a great senior, we need him to be a usable sophomore.