Dogfight Begins

"Playing The Citadel is like looking in the mirror," Samford basketball coach Jimmy Tillette said back in February.

Now that March Madness is here in the form of the Southern Conference Tournament in Charlotte, the Bulldogs (of The Citadel) and the Bulldogs (of Samford) will be looking in the mirror for the fourth time in a year.

Samford, of course, is the team that soured one of The Citadel's greatest seasons ever last year. The Citadel had won 20 games for just the second time in school history and earned a first-round bye in the SoCon Tournament, only to be knocked out by Samford, 76-67, in the quarterfinals in Chattanooga.

The two teams met twice this season, The Citadel eking out victories of 51-50 and 61-57.

So Citadel coach Ed Conroy is expecting nothing less than a (Bull)dog fight when the two teams meet in a first-round game today at 7 p.m. at Bojangles Coliseum.

"I expect another tight one," said Conroy, whose team is 15-15 overall and 9-9 in the SoCon. "Samford is a tough matchup for us, really tough. They showed that in the tournament last year and in our two games this year. We're going to have to play our best basketball of the season, but I think our guys are in a great frame of mind."

That's encouraging, considering that The Citadel is taking a three-game losing streak with them to Charlotte. The Citadel had won five straight, scoring 70-plus points in three consecutive games for the first time since games 6-9 of last year's season-defining 11-game win streak.

But then The Citadel hit a wall, scoring just 53 and 44 points in losses to UNC Greensboro and Furman before ending the regular season with a 75-66 loss at South Divison champion Wofford. Against Furman, mainstays Cameron Wells, Austin Dahn and Zach Urbanus combined to go 3 for 30 from the field.

"Sometimes teams have to remake themselves at different times," Conroy said. "You don't like that time to be in late February, but this is one of those times we've had to do that."

Conroy has tried to do that by going back to the fundamentals -- movement, screening, execution -- that had his team scoring so well.

"The easiest thing to do is look at the stat sheet and say, certain guys didn't hit shots," he said. "But I told the team, that would be letting ourselves off the hook too easily. Things were going so well on the offensive end that I think we started to take them for granted and stopped doing the things that created those points."

Said Urbanus: "We just stopped working hard on the offensive end. I think we felt like we had it solved, and that's definitely not the case. The past week or so, we've really worked hard to get it back, to get moving and get working to get each other shots. I think we'll be back and ready to score in the tournament."

Samford, meanwhile, brings an 11-19 overall record, 5-13 mark in the SoCon and three-game losing streak into the tournament. Its season was marred by the death of senior Jim Griffin last September, and by Tillette's collapse during a game at UNC Greensboro on Jan. 23. Tillette, 59, suffered a "vascular anomaly" and missed three games.

Samford mirrors The Citadel in that both teams play a patient style of offense based on motion and a lot of 3-point shots. But Samford was the only team in the league with no players selected to an All-SoCon squad. Guard Josh Davis is Samford's top scorer at 12.9 ppg, and lit up The Citadel for 24 points in a 61-57 loss on Feb. 4.

Samford is second in the league (to The Citadel) in scoring defense (60.9 ppg), and took the fourth-most 3-pointers in league play, hitting 150 of 396 for 37.9 percent.

Should The Citadel get by Samford, a quarterfinal matchup with North No. 1 seed Appalachian State awaits. App State went 20-11 overall and 13-5 in the SoCon in coach Buzz Peterson's return to Boone, but one of its five SoCon defeats was a 62-58 loss to The Citadel at home on Jan. 6. And should The Citadel make it to Sunday, it will face one of three teams -- College of Charleston, Chattanooga or Georgia Southern. The Citadel was 3-3 against those teams this season.

That's about as favorable a route as The Citadel could hope for, with three teams it was 0-5 against (Wofford, Davidson and UNC Greensboro) in the other side of the bracket.

"I think we can win this tournament," Wells said. "All the teams in this league, the games have been close, we showed we can stay with them, we showed we can beat them. We just have to stay focused and play to the end of the game, and I think we can pull it out."