Titans hand Mustangs fourth straight home loss

Cal State Fullerton got way ahead in the first half and hung-on for the conference win. By Owen Main

There isn’t a whole lot to say after that one. Cal Poly got beat-up to the tune of their largest halftime deficit of the season on Thursday night. Fullerton’s first half gave the Titans enough wiggle-room to withstand a few Cal Poly runs in the second half and hang-on for the 67-59 win.

Cal Poly has now lost six of their last seven conference games. The Mustangs have now failed to score more than 62 points in eight straight games and still aren’t playing the team-oriented, trust-powered basketball fans in San Luis Obispo have grown accustomed to over the past few seasons.

With the loss, Cal Poly is in fifth place, but only two games in front of last-place UC Riverside with four conference games remaining. The 9th (last) place team during the Big West’s regular season does not participate in the Big West Tournament at the end of the year.

The first half included a long stretch where Cal Poly missed 11 consecutive field goals.

Quotes

Chris Eversley:

“Until we lose the final game of the season, the sky’s not falling… . They out-hustled us, hat’s off to them. They’re a great team. They came in here and beat us up on the boards — just physicality all over the floor, and that just goes back to us… that was on us tonight. There’s nothing that they can do as coaches to prepare us to play hard and to be focused and concentrate for 40 minutes.”

“Our concentration periods have to be better.”

Joe Callero:

“You’ve got to really take your hat off to Fullerton really coming out and punch(ing) us in the mouth. I think they did a great job of coming out more aggressive, just quicker, stronger… . ”

“Chris Eversley said to me after the Long Beach game, ‘coach, I really think I just gotta get my butt back inside there and really be an interior threat and play off me as an interior player.’ We were developing him as a three-man, as a shooter, as a mover without the ball and long-term in his career he kind of thought that might be the best thing. We said, ‘we’ve just gotta get you backed down and get gritty points.’ I think tonight was the best gritty performance we’ve had. Getting Chris Eversley back to being a double-double machine is a priority for us.”

“The bad news is, it slides us down to the bottom half of the conference. The good news is there’s still two and a half weeks left in conference play for us to put ourselves in a position to have a playoff run. we’re definitely still tinkering and we definitely need to continue to tinker because with the tema that we’ve had this year we have strengths on one side that aren’t necessarily strengths on the other side — guys that can shoot it maybe aren’t our best defenders and maybe our best defenders aren’t our best shooters. But I’ll tell you what, one thing guys can do is play their heart out. Play and be ready.”

“The intensity in that first half. The energy in that first half is unacceptable.”

Photos by Owen Main