Team #106 - Radford

Welcome to the 2022-23 College Basketball Season. My season kicked off on the opening day of the year as I saw my 106th Division One College Basketball team. On this occasion, I saw the Radford Highlanders take on the Marquette Golden Eagles. Radford is the 1st team and final team that I have seen out of the Big South. This game marks the start of the season for both teams. Radford finished 11-18 last year while Marquette finished 19-13 and lost to North Carolina in the 1st Round of the NCAA Tournament. Both teams have new looks this year. Radford will be looking to get good production out of former Villanova Wildcat, Bryan Antoine. Marquette will be looking to get good production from Kam Jones and Tyler Kolek this season following the loss of Justin Lewis. 

You never know what you are going to get out of teams the first game of the year. Most schedule lesser opponents for a reason. It was only one year ago that I was writing about Marquette getting a couple of early season scares from SIUE and New Hampshire. How different would the start to the 2022-23 Season be? Marquette had good control the game in the first half. Tyler Kolek has always done a nice job of this against lesser opponents. They occasionally had the first game of the year sloppy plays but for the most part Marquette controlled the first half. Kam Jones and Oso Ighodaro each had 10 points in the 1st half to lead Marquette. Radford was lead by a pair of transfers. DaQuan Smith, a Murray State transfer had seven as well as Villanova transfer Bryan Antoine. The biggest difference I noticed from Marquette early in this game was they did not shoot a whole lot of threes. Last year I felt at times, they shot way too many threes for a team that was not very good from behind the three point line. 

During the second half, Radford was very pesky. Marquette extended the lead to 15 on a couple of occasions but could not put away Radford. On two occasions, Radford cut the Marquette lead to under five points. Shaka Smart was very much so playing with his lineups in this game as many coaches do early in the year. Smart played a lot of Freshman Chase Ross and Sean Jones. Chase Ross has a chance to be very special. He played pretty decent defense and was not afraid of the moment. Oso Ighodaro showed a few bright spots in this game that he could be a very productive big man in the Big East. On this occasion, Ighodaro had 19 points and was the leading scorer for the game. One pleasant surprise for Radford was Freshman Kenyon Giles. In his first collegiate game, he had 15 points on 7-11 shooting. Not bad for a first game. Bryan Antoine was disappointing for Radford. I think everyone expects guys to dominate the lower levels when they transfer down. I saw that was not the case first hand last year with Patrick Baldwin Jr. Maybe Antoine is still hurt. He never got to show his full potential at Villanova. Antoine was once the #15 recruit in the Class of 2019 and ranked higher than Drew Timme and Oscar Tshiebwe. Now looking back at this class there was some major busts ahead of him and maybe this class wasn't very good. I hope the best for Antoine while he is at Radford. Marquette would go on to win this game by a score of 79-69. Marquette has Central Michigan on 11/10. Radford will now travel to Notre Dame. I will not see Marquette again until November 29th against Baylor. 

My next game is Friday as I head to American Family Field (home of the Milwaukee Brewers) to see the Wisconsin Badgers take on the Stanford Cardinal.