Utah coach Rick Majerus is fond of saying how players for service academy teams such as Air Force and Navy are the exact kind people you want protecting our country in the future.
Let's just hope that the guys from Navy shoot torpedoes a lot better than they shoot basketballs.The cold-shooting Midshipmen were no match for the No. 2-ranked Utah basketball team Friday in the first round of the NCAA Tournament at the University of Arizona McKale Center.
Even though the winners of the Patriot League outrebounded the much-taller Utes and had eight fewer turnovers, the Utes still cruised to a 75-61 victory.
The win puts Utah into a second-round matchup Sunday at 12:35 p.m. against NC-Charlotte, a 79-67 winner over Georgetown.
The difference in Utah's victory was shooting. While the Utes shot 57 percent on 27 of 47 from the field, Navy could only manage a measly 31.6 percent on 24-of-76 shooting and had to make its final three shots in the final 90 seconds just to crack the 30 percent mark.
Of course a lot of the poor marksmanship had to do with Utah's defense, which has held most opponents below 40 percent this year. The tenacious Utes got down to business on defense and held Navy's leading scorer Michael Heary to just 2-of-12 shooting and nine points on the day.
"We tried to take him out his game because he's a great scorer," said Majerus. "We wanted to limit his looks."
Among the other Navy starters, Michael Green was 1-for-6, Ryan Palumbo 0-for-3 and Hassan Booker 7-for-18. Only point guard Brian Walker, the Sugar Ray Leonard look-alike, had a decent shooting game, going 5-for-9.
"Our team's bad shooting had a lot to do with Utah," said Navy coach Don DeVoe. "They are a smart team that forced us to take a lot of bad shots. We wanted to come out and drive the ball at them, but their defense would not allow that. Utah really had a great defense today."
"We were surprised how Utah played," said Booker. "They came ready to play on defense. We wanted to run, but we weren't able to and that kind of messed us up."
Offensively, the Utes were unspectacular, but coolly effective. They couldn't be happy with the 20 turnovers - their third largest total of the season - or the fact that they gave up 22 offensive rebounds and were outrebounded 25 to 13 in the second half.
They showed great balance as Michael Doleac scored 19 points, Keith Van Horn 16, Ben Caton 14 and Andre Miller 12 as all shot 50 percent or better, led by Caton's 6 of 7 from the field.
The Utah-Navy game started just after another No. 2 seed, South Carolina, had been upset by unheralded Coppin State in the first round of the East Regional. The last thing the Utes wanted was a repeat of their first-round game in the WAC tournament a week earlier when they were nearly upset by SMU. "We knew we had to come out fired up and play our game," said Van Horn.
Early on, the Utes fell behind 8-5, but then their defense quickly kicked into gear. For six and a half minutes, the Midshipmen couldn't score as they missed nine straight shots and turned the ball over three times, while the Utes scored 12 straight points. Once the Utes went ahead 26-16 on a Caton 3-pointer with 6:36 left in the first half, Navy never got closer than double-digits the rest of the game.
The lead got as high as 19 at 38-19 before the Utes settled for a 40-24 halftime lead. The Middies shot just 26 percent in the first half compared to Utah's 56 percent.
Everyone but a few die-hard Navy fans knew this one was over, but the scrappy Midshipmen would never go away as they traded baskets with Utah throughout much of the second half.
With 6-7 Palumbo and 6-6 Seth Schuknecht ineffective in the post in the first half against the taller Doleac and Van Horn, the Midshipmen started seldom-used 6-11 sophomore Josh Williams in the middle. He started the half quite inauspiciously, having three shots in a row blocked, two by Van Horn and one by Doleac, but ended up playing most of the half, scoring eight points with eight rebounds.
The Ute lead stayed between 13 and 20 points nearly the entire second half, until the Utes went up by 21 at 75-54 before Navy sank three straight shots against the Ute reserves to make the final score somewhat respectable.
With the comfortable victory, the Utes were able to rest their starters quite a bit as only Doleac played more than 30 minutes. Even though the reserves played a lot of minutes, they didn't add much offensively, scoring a total of nine points.