WBI Round 2 - WIU at USC-Upstate

Thu Mar 17, 2016 10:01 pm

So, I realized I should have done one of these for the first round game against SIU, but didn't get it done in time. I'll be out of town over the weekend and will be busy packing and stuff on Friday, so I don't know that I'd be able to get anything together then...I thought I'd be good to go ahead and put something together tonight instead.

AT

Game will be at 6 PM Central (7 PM Eastern) on Saturday, March 19th.

University of South Carolina - Upstate is a public university located in Spartanburg, SC. They have right around 6,000 students and they play their athletics in the Atlantic Sun Conference (a group of mostly non-football sponsoring schools across the region of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky).

USC-U (both men's and women's teams) plays at the 878-seat G.B. Hodge Center. The Hodge Center is the smallest arena in Division I men's basketball (see below for photo). They averaged 212 attendees per home game this season. Looks like it's pretty small, but nice...newer seats, crowd is close to the action, nice video boards. I've added a video at the bottom highlighting their arena improvements if you're interested.

USC-U's Women's Basketball team finished the regular season (plus conference tournament) 20-11 overall and 10-4 in their conference. We do actually have one opponent in common with USC-U this season...they played at IPFW way back on November 21, winning 84-81 (we beat IPFW twice, 78-74 in FW on 1/7, then 88-87 in Macomb on 2/4).

As a conference, the Atlantic Sun is ranked the #28th best D1 conference for women's basketball (out of 32) and the Summit League is ranked #18. USC-U's RPI rank (from realtimerpi.com) is 214 and Western's is 243.

Without digging too much into the details, it seems like we're pretty evenly matched. You can see a detailed stat comparison between Western and USC-Upstate here.
They have a better defense (in terms of scoring against them) but we have a better offense (actually 23rd in the NCAA in scoring offense). We are 3rd best in the NCAA in fewest turnovers (6th in turnovers per game). They are 9th in the NCAA in rebounds per game. We're 8th in the NCAA in 3-pt FGs per game.

Here's their women's basketball section of their athletics website for more information: http://www.upstatespartans.com/sports/w-baskbl/index
And here's the updated WBI bracket: http://static.psbin.com/4/m/qm7m1hrnlja ... t_3-17.pdf
Winner of our game plays the winner of Weber State at North Dakota. They're both in the Big Sky...this is the third time they'll meet this season, splitting the games with the visitor winning each of the first two.

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