REACTION: Maryland 71, Utah 56

From earlier in the night in my gameday post:

PREDICTION - Maryland 70, Utah 58.

I'm a genius.

Seriously, being off by one point on the Terp side and two on the Ute side...that's pretty good, you gotta admit. Though I must admit that I was a little bit wrong about how the game would go. I said that that it would be close until the second half when the Terps would pull away. Instead, Maryland pushed the lead to 16 by halftime with a 12-0 run in the final 4:40 of the half. The Terps were up 21 at the under 16 timeout in the second half but then the Utes chipped away and got the lead back down to 14 at the 9 minute mark. But the Terps quickly swelled it back to 20 a couple of minutes later and cruised to the finish, winning by a healthy 15.

I wrote in the gameday that I thought that Elaine Elliott would want to slow down the pace of the game and keep it low-scoring. Whoops. I'm STUNNED that Utah played at Maryland's pace, at least in the first half. Absolutely stunned. It actually worked for a while, as the Utes led 15-8 with almost 5 and a half minutes gone by. But then the Terps staged their comeback, beginning with an absolutely ridiculous sequence.

Dee Liles laid it up after a dish from Coleman to make it 15-10. Morgan Warburton missed a three for Utah on the other end, but then so did Toliver for the Terps. Fortunately for them, Coleman grabbed the offensive board, the ball found its way in to Liles, who missed a layup but got her own rebound and the putback. 15-12. This is where the Maryland fans started getting in to it. You could hear a roar begin; the crowd knew the run was coming. Janita Badon drove to the hole but laid it up far too hard and Liles collected the board. Crowd's getting louder. Toliver rushes it up the court and proceeds to make an absolutely breathtaking no-look bounce pass to a wide-open Strickland underneath for the easy deuce and the Comcast Center goes absolutely ballistic as I yelled out "OH WHAT A PASS!" to no one in particular. 15-14. Warburton tries to answer with a three and can't and now Maryland can grab the lead. Again it's Toliver pushing it up the court. She penetrates and goes for another no-look...but this time it's deflected and it's a turnover. An outlet pass to Josi McDermott and it looks to be an easy two for the Utes...but Marissa Coleman was making strides like a leopard waiting to stalk its prey. I'm not sure if everyone in the building knew what was coming next but I knew that with Coleman's speed and length, Josi McDermott would not be scoring two points at this particular time.

She didn't. Coleman absolutely swatted her meek layup attempt right in to the backboard. The crowd just loses it again. Comcast is among the loudest I've heard it for a women's basketball game so nobody notices that Kalee Whipple's there to retrive the bounce off the backboard and put up a quick three. Bang...and like that, Comcast goes silent. 18-14.

UNBELIEVABLE sequence. We're talking about almost two uninterrupted minutes of nonstop action and ridiculous plays. I learned a few things after this sequence:

1) There are few things more beautiful than Kristi Toliver in the open floor
2) Kristi Toliver's an absolutely unbelievable passer
3) Marissa Coleman might be the biggest hustler in women's college basketball
4) Brenda Frese has built an absolutely stunning and unbelievable culture of women's basketball here in College Park
5) The non-student fans for women's basketball are way, WAY better than the non-student fans for men's basketball. It's probably because all the non-student fans for women's hoops are diehards.
6) I'm really, REALLY going to miss watching Coleman and Toliver play
7) Kalee Whipple can really play as well
8) Utah had the momentum after Whipple's three. If they could ride it out for the next few minutes, they'd have a shot at the upset. If the Terps seized it, ballgame over.

Guess which happened.

Maryland proceeded to go on an 8-0 run after that sequence to grab a 22-18 lead. During the run, Coleman had 6 points and 2 rebounds. My god, what a player. After Warburton laid it in to make it 22-20, another Terrapin spurt occured, this one 6-0. This one was a little more diverse, with a layup and two free throws from Lynetta Kizer, a jumper from Marah Strickland, and an assist and a rebound for Anjale Barrett.

That diversity was the story of the first half. Toliver and Coleman, despite their ridiculous plays and how good they were, had exactly half of the Maryland points at halftime. Coleman had 12, Toliver had 10, together they had 22...but the team had 44 as Liles and Strickland had 8 apiece, Kizer had 4, and Barrett had 2. On the other sideline, it was a completely different story. The Utes had 28 points at recess. Whipple and Warburton combined for 21, or 3/4 of them.

There was your prevailing theme for the night. Whipple and Warburton were the only two players on Utah's roster who would get significant run for the Terps. They are both fantastic players (although Warburton didn't have her best shooting night; 7/21 from the field, 0/6 from three), but no other Ute proved that they could really hack it all night long, at least not in comparison to their opposition. Whipple ended the night with a game-high 24 points and Warburton had 17. That's 41 of the 56 Ute points and no other individual had more than 8.

You need more than two players to beat this Maryland Terrapin team, especially at the Comcast Center.

The other prevailing theme for the night was how Utah got worked like a speed bag on the interior once again. I will put this to you this way: the Utes as a team had 24 rebounds. Marissa Coleman by herself had a career-high 18 rebounds (to go along with 18 points...honestly, if she's not an All American, I'm boycotting this sport.) Dee Liles by herself had 17 rebounds. Um, that's really not good if you're a Utah fan. When two individual players are nearly matching your team's rebounding output, it probably means you're taking a pounding on the interior. Tonight was no exception (actually last night since this is being written the morning after but I haven't slept yet so we'll say "tonight"; also I'm lazy and "tonight" is easier to write than "last night" or "yesterday") as the Terps outrebounded the Utes 54-24. 54-24. The margin the visitors were outrebounded by was larger than their actual rebound total. That also isn't good. The Terps had more offensive rebounds, 25, than the Utes had total rebounds. Coleman outrebounded the Utes by herself in the first half. And all of this was against a team that was 12th in the country in rebounding margin coming in to the season and had only been outrebounded in five games this year.

Elaine Elliott, just how the heck did this happen?

"It's just pure and simple -- their strength over us was just their physicality. We couldn't change that. We couldn't grow bigger. We couldn't grow heavier," Elliott said. "That was the difference in the two teams. We would have preferred that it wasn't a home game. ... [But] the differences in that game were apparent and that was something we wouldn't have overcome no matter where we played."

Liles ended with 12 points to go along with her 17 boards, Kizer and Strickland each had 8, and Kim Rodgers chipped in 6 on a couple of threes. Oh yeah and Toliver finished with 17 points and 4 assists. Not bad for your final appearance in the Comcast Center. I'm sure Coleman's 18 and 18 counts as a pretty nice lasting impression for the 10,065 in attendance tonight as well.

So the story here was basically that Utah's only chance was to slow this game down in an attempt to mitigate the Terps' advantages in pure talent, athleticism, and size. They didn't do it. They got run out of the gym. They had a few talented players who were able to keep them in it for a while and brought them back to a respectable deficit at brief points in the second half, but all in all, it just wasn't nearly enough. Also, I think, they wilted a bit playing in front of an absolutely lively and raucuous crowd that you just would not have gotten at a neutral site. So put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Maryland now moves on to play Vanderbilt on Saturday in the Sweet 16 in Raleigh. Before that though, it's time to introduce something special that's about to come to this blog.

Remember Spokanemania from last year? Well, it's coming back. Except it's not going to be in Spokane this time, it'll be in Raleigh. Thusly, it'll be repackaged, rebranded, and renamed as...

Drum roll, please...

*edge of your seat*

RALEIGHPALOOZA!

That's right, John Willmott, Hal DeCoursey, and Jeremy Moreland are heading down to Raleigh and they're gonna tell you all about it. Starting this Friday (or, perhaps if you're good and they make solid time, Thursday night), you'll get an account of what it's like to stay in Raleigh for a weekend while your school's women's basketball team attempts to reach the Final Four. Will there be a trip (or trips) to the Official WMUC Sports Sonic? Will there be little digs at N.C. State's campus for being literally nothing but red brick? Will they meet any celebrities down in North Carolina like, um, NASCAR drivers or John Edwards maybe? What if Duke AND North Carolina happen to go down in the men's tournament this weekend; will there be an historic party on the Wolfpack campus? WHO KNOWS?!?! So stay tuned for that, it should be a ton of fun.