After defeating San Diego by 43 points last week, the Utah basketball team dropped a 48-point bomb on a severely outmanned Savannah State team Saturday afternoon, winning by an 87-39 margin.
The victory, before approximately 5,000 fans at the Huntsman Center, moved the Utes to 6-2 on the season with a tough game coming up Tuesday night at 4-0 Louisiana State.
Saturday's game went pretty much as expected for one scheduled as an end-of-test-week breather and because the opponents' coach is a friend of Ute coach Rick Majerus.
The Tigers, who won just four games last year and had already lost games by 40 and 38 points this season, were no match for the Utes, despite the fact that the home team rested its top players and really didn't play all that great.
The only real mystery is how this Tiger team could possibly have beaten Eastern Kentucky earlier this week.
None of Utah's top three scorers on the season even played more than 15 minutes as Majerus played his second-stringers and an out-of-shape Tim Frost as many minutes as possible.
Freshman center Andrew Bogut scored 17 points in just 15 minutes on 8-of-11 shooting, while Richard Chaney scored nine in 14 minutes before getting an elbow in the face early in the second half. He went to the hospital where he was diagnosed with a bruise below his right eye.
Then there was Nick Jacobson, who everyone assumed would easily break Keith Van Horn's career 3-point record of 206. Jacobson needed to make just three treys, but didn't play enough to have a chance at the mark as he only took two and made one in his 14 minutes of action. He finished with just five points on the day and 205 3-pointers for his career.
Frost, still working his way back into shape after sitting out most of the preseason with a back injury, had the best numbers, finishing with 13 points and 12 rebounds in 30 minutes of action. He was the logical choice to be interviewed after the game, but alas, Majerus had him running sprints in the nearby HPER gym to help his conditioning.
For his part, after the game Majerus almost acted embarrassed by the margin of victory as well as the opponent.
"There's nothing really you can say . . . your front line was too much. I knew we were going to be too much," he said. "I wanted to book a team that I felt we could beat at the end of exam week."
He also extolled his team's academic record for the umpteenth time and rationalized the opponent by pointing out that the Utes are "the only team in our league that will play a Big East team, a Big Ten team, two Big 12 teams and an SEC team" this year.
Savannah State is nothing like the aforementioned teams — an independent in its second year in Division I, it's coached by Edwin Daniels, who played for Majerus when he was an assistant at Marquette in the mid-1970s.
The Utes quickly jumped ahead 18-4 as the Utes kept lobbing the ball over the smaller Tigers into the nearly 7-foot Bogut, who scored 11 straight. The lead reached 38-9 before the Utes settled for a 43-16 halftime margin.
The only thing that kept the game from being a 50-point-plus rout was the generous officials, who kept sending the Tigers to the free-throw line, where they made 19-of-29, compared to Utah's 17-of-27. For the game, the Tigers hit an abysmal 18.2 percent from the field, the lowest ever by a Ute opponent.
Besides Bogut's 17 and Frost's 13 points, sophomore center Chris Jackson had one of his better outings as a Ute, finishing with 10 points, nine rebounds and five blocked shots.
Savannah State didn't have a single player in double figures as Thomas Simpson and Darien Taylor led the way with seven points apiece.
UTE NOTES: Freshman Josh Olsen had another solid game with nine points on 3-of-4 from 3-point range . . . This marked the second-straight game the Utes held their opponent to 39 points . . . Jonas Langvad had four points and three steals in 12 minutes off the bench . . . Bogut, who is one of the top rebounders in the nation with 11.9 per game, only had two boards . . . Utah had a season-high 24 assists and a season-low 12 turnovers . . . The announced attendance was 10,345 . . . Perhaps the biggest cheer of the night was reserved for 5-10 walk-on Mike Mesdaghi, who hit a baseline jumper with 1:46 left to make it 82-39.
E-mail: sor@desnews.com