The Victoria Times

I'm sorry I didn't post yesterday like I promised. I'm a bad blogger. I apologize profusely. At any rate, you want to hear about my trip? No? Too bad. I'm going to talk about the game now, and in another post, hopefully tonight, we'll talk about the trip itself.
The game, Denver at Louisiana-Monroe, was held at Fant-Ewing Coliseum in Monroe. The campus, mostly white brick, and mostly seen at night, lies on the Bayou De Siard, giving the whole place a fairly attractive look. The arena was clearly built in the 60s, but is still in fine shape.
Too bad nobody goes to games there.

Sure this was taken towards the end of the women's game (great game, by the way, ended in overtime with Denver pulling it out), but I have corroborating evidence from the beginning of the men's game as well (although, look at the army of cheerleaders):

The three guys sitting behind us were sort of ULM super fans and spent the whole game talking about the team, which they said was down this year simply because they weren't making the shots they were last year. Also, they spent a good deal talking about the football team and how excited they are about the game against Auburn next year, how much they don't like Louisiana Tech and how they need to do a better job of keeping students on campus during the weekends, simply to fill Fant-Ewing. There really wasn't much going on around campus that we saw, save for one daiquiri joint, and even that was drive-through.

Also, on the subject of sports, they were almost unanimously not impressed by Reggie Bush of the Saints, and hoped New Orleans would pick a running back to carry the load, so Bush could remain as a swing back. It's what I've been saying all along. But that's not the point of the post. Let's get to the game itself.
The Pioneers were without their leading scorer, David Kummer who was hobbling around the bench on crutches and wearing an air cast, and frankly, the Pioneers looked like they were asleep the whole game. They immediately had a pair of shot clock violations and both times didn't look like they were aware of the clock. Freshman Rob Lewis, who led the Pioneers with 21 points seemed like the only player that knew what needed to be done.
On a side note, the Pioneers kept doing this weird inbound routine, where they passed it along the baseline then inbounded it and then passed it back to the point guard. It took forever and was completely pointless and no doubt hurt them on time.
Louisiana-Monroe was led by Tony Hooper both offensively and defensively. He was a wizard penetrating into the lane and had a couple of awesome reverse layups and really opened up offensive end of the court for the Warhawks. ULM was up by 10 when Hooper took an elbow to the face that opened up a cut under his eye and sent him to the locker room for 6 minutes. In those 6 minutes, I really got a feel for his importance to the game. Denver went on a 15-0 run, as the game shifted to a front court contest, where Denver was much more talented. The Pioneers method for getting the ball down low was taking outside jumpers and letting their big men, like Andrew Tanner clean up the boards and get put backs. When Hooper was in there, he wouldn't let the guards get clean looks at the basket, and they weren't getting the ball inside where they had the advantage.
Hooper came back and energized the team, for the final few minutes, with the Warhawks going on a 20-10 run to finish the game. The Warhawks won, 53-48.

I guess the thing that really struck me was how out of sorts and flat Denver played. They had almost no energy. On the other end of the court, Tony Hooper was clearly the best player on the court. I could see why ULM sits at the bottom of the conference though. On an off night for Hooper, the Warhawks are left with pretty much nothing to work with.
So that's the game. Be back sometime with a recap of the trip itself today. Below are some more pictures that I couldn't fit into the post.