Aggies Win Season Opener!

Hey guys - I am sure everyone saw, but the Aggies did what they were supposed to do and took care of Arkansas-Pine Bluff last night with little problem.

The 76-47 victory for the good guys was never close and they looked MUCH better as a unit than they did last week for their exhibition game vs. TAMU-Kingsville.

Here is a brief recap from Brent Zwerneman who writes for the San Antonio Express-News and the Houston Chronicle:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/sports/6116346

We made it up to Reed yesterday afternoon and my quick 2 cents is that as a group, the Good Guys looked much better. Their defensive effort was quite strong against a pretty good sized group from Ark-PB, especially when they were crashing the boards. The Aggies out-rebounded the Golden Lions 38-28 including a very impressive 23 offensive boards for the Aggies.

It is also worth nothing that Josh Carter was simply awesome last night and there is no other way to put it. The lone contributing Senior on the A&M squad had 23 points on 7-of-11 shooting (including 5-of-9 from downtown) while grabbing 6 boards and 2 steals.

Now, outside of Carter, the Aggies shot a very poor 31% (7-of-54) from the field and an even worse 14% (2-of-14) from behind the arc. My guess is that you will not see the Aggies miss this many shots very often. I am chalking it up to a little early season rust and just knowing that I have seen this group shoot the ball much better than they did last night.

One other thing I want to point out is that I found it very interesting to see that B.J. Holmes was the first guy up off the bench for Turgeon last night. There were also quite a few rotations where Turgeon had all three point guards (Sloan, Harris and Holmes) on the floor together. There was about a 5 minute stretch of the 2nd half where he went super-small and had Holmes, Sloan, Harris, Walkup and Loubeau on the floor together. I still have some concerns about this team's lack of size on the interior, but man alive when he goes small they can get up and down the floor like nobody's business. When they were playing fast it was awfully fun to watch.

Tomorrow night (Tuesday) the Aggies host the Lumberjacks of Stephen F. Austin in what will undoubtedly be a closer-than-you-think game for the Aggies. The 'Jacks were 26-6 last year and beat Oklahoma in Norman. They have 4 starters back from last year's squad and are just as good if not better this year. They are led by Josh Alexander who was the 2008 Southland Conference player-of-the-year.

We will be making the trek to Reed again tomorrow and will have a quick look back for you guys later in the week.

Let me know if you guys have any questions or anything else you want to know about this year's squad.

If you are just hangin' around the house (or stuck at work late) tomorrow night you can log onto AggieAthletics.com and watch the game free online.

-sb