George Mason wasn’t able to overcome Auburn’s athletic bigs last night on the road for their season opener and fell 70-52. The Tigers dominated the glass and garnered numerous second chance opportunities with their 22 offensive rebounds. Mason needed to combat Auburn’s size and length by hitting three-pointers but that never materialized. Josh Oduro was swallowed up inside and got into foul trouble fairly early on. Only Ronny Polite reached double digits in scoring (10).
Kim English boasted about the team’s depth coming into this season but they were unable to get many runs going aside from a short one to end the first half. Depth or not they needed guys like DeVon Cooper and Ticket Gaines to make shows and the two were almost non-existent in this one. Newcomer Victory Bailey Jr., will be one of this years leading scorers, started out aggressive but was later fizzled out. Mason had trouble moving the ball and didn’t really have success creating opportunities against a very physical Auburn team.
Playing at Auburn, despite the Tigers missing key players, was no easy task for a season opener. It’s a very tough environment to play and Auburn fed off the crowd energy early. Mason won’t likely play a team as physical on defense as they did last night but having said that it was a little alarming they couldn’t put up more of a fight. It also wasn’t great to see Oduro be minimalized so early and never really recover. Most of us have expectations for him to be a conference player of the year.
The point guard situation will definitely be a big topic of conversation this season. English had said earlier that it would be a rotation of Ronny Polite, Saquon Singleton and freshman Devin Dinkins this season. We saw some good tings from Singleton and Polite last night against a very good defense but it remains to be seen how effective this rotation will be as the season goes on. They obviously want to groom Dinkins into the role but that will take some adjustment. Singleton definitely has the size and athleticism to be an interesting matchup but may still need to shake off rust from not seeing much action due to injury in prior years. I would expect to see Polite get more minutes here early on but that could definitely change as the season progresses, especially if turnovers remain an issue.
This year’s team is a veteran one, the starting five last night included five seniors including most who have more than four years of college experience. I would expect them to not get rattled like we saw early last night. While it is the first game of the season I would still hope this isn’t a recurring theme.
