Five Takeaways from George Mason vs St. Louis

Mason had won four straight games heading into last night, so given the winning streak, I held off on starting a blog series about the team. I've been catching replays on ESPN+ due to living on the west coast, so a lot of the fun of watching the team in realtime and tweeting away has been limited (in fact, I've been avoiding my phone on gamedays until I get to watch the game).

The Patriots got beat last night in double overtime, with Yuri Collins of St. Louis playing Superman (Collins was amazing in the game).

Here's what I noticed from the game:

• Mason looked terrible for long stretches in this one. A lot of the bad habits we saw early in the season (unforced turnovers, missed foul shots) crept up on them. Everyone has an off game, but it was glaring, and if Mason wants to be one of the top teams in the A-10, this has to be corrected.
• That said, there were points where it felt like they were going to win. The team didn't panic or fold up, They lept plugging away, which is WAY different than the last few years of Mason basketball (and is wildly refreshing). I'm loving the Kim English era, and I'd note, for all of the chatter about St Bonaventure being a veteran team, Mason's not rolling a bunch of freshmen out there. This is a veteran team, even if all the guys haven't been together for all that long.
• Coach English has very little trust in his bench. At times this season, we've seen Malik Henry and Ronnie Polite as the only guys to get time, and in the case of Henry, it's usually until Henry makes his first egregious mistake (which is still pretty common). Polite seems to have been a littl injured last night, which exascerbated the issue.

  I asked Coach why Ronny didn’t get a his normal amount of playing time and he said the assistants noticed he wasn’t moving well and pulled him.

  — By George. (@ByGeorgeGMU) February 3, 2022

  This left Otis Frazier, who seems like a swiss army knife as an undersized 4 that can switch everything on defense but is still developing on offense, as the only bench player the coach English wanted to play in OT. Mason's starters looked gassed at the end of the game (deservedly so... they definitely left it on the court), but both this team could use one more strong bench piece. This team has a Tyler Kolek-sized hole in the roster.
• I though the refs were... questionable. Mason got a lot of homer calls (thanks, I guess), but at the same time, there were some BIG misses (the over and back being the biggest). I suppose it all came out in the wash, and Mason looked so lackadaisical that they didn't deserve to be in this one at different points... but yeah. Some questionable calls all around.

Let's also be clear. Kim English is a WAY better coach than I am, so take this with a grain of salt. But, I was surprised to not see coach roll Oduro and Henry together in the second overtime. St. Louis was basically out of bigs, and Mason's jumbo lineup was (by the eye test, and in a limited sample), pretty interesting against UMass.

On to Lasalle.