Alcorn State travels to NC State in the hopes of mitigating its own unpleasantness

The first person that comes to mind when I think of Alcorn State is Steve McNair, and honestly it would be a better idea to meditate on McNair’s greatness rather than thinking about the Braves’ atrocious basketball team. So I recommend doing that.

I’m going to keep this one short because there are only so many distressing statistical factoids I can consume before madness begins to set in.

The Braves finished last season 349th out of 353 teams in the Pomeroy Ratings and won a grand total of 10 games, though only six of those were against D-I foes. Under the circumstances, I can fault them for padding the slate. If you’re gonna ask these kids to go on the road to power-conference schools and serve as target practice, I’d say you owe them a little bit of fun too.

Alcorn ranked 310th or worse in FT%, 2FG%, and 3FG% and that shooting accuracy problem alone was going to make this offense bad even if they were above-average in the other factors ... uh, which they were not.

The Braves will likely shuffle through a lot of lineup combinations in an effort to find a hot hand or two. No doubt that junior wing Troymain Crosby will be heavily in the mix, as he’s been a high-workload guy throughout his career. And he does a few things reasonably well, like get to the line and make his free throws. He also has been a good rebounder for his size (6’4, 200). But he’s also a career 44.6% two-point shooter, and he’s 5-53 from three in 2+ seasons.

Guard Maurice Howard is a legitimate three-point threat: 39.8% on 181 attempts in 2019, and 36.6% for his career. He was the only Alcorn State rotation player to make more than 30% of his threes last season.

Everybody on this team has significant flaws, and I would expect the Braves to make plenty of mistakes.

Alcorn State’s defense could have been worse last season if the Braves weren’t lucky enough to have opponents shoot just 32.1% on threes. Those opponents also made over 55% of their twos, though, so the three-point shooting tended not to be a deal-breaker. The shoddy interior defense is carrying over into this season, as opponents have hit nearly 64% from inside the arc. Memphis made nearly 69% of its twos against Alcorn on Saturday, and that was without elite big man James Wiseman.

The Pomeroy Predictor likes NC State by 27.