Middle Tennesee State University Athletics
"If we don't have our defense, we're not going to make it where we want to be” - Defense suffocates CUSA in opening weekend rout for Women’s Basketball
1/6/2025 3:25:00 PM | Women's Basketball
MTSU held the preseason No. 2 and No. 3 teams in the league to an average of under 40 points a game over the weekend.
MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — After a 69-41 drubbing of Liberty, Middle Tennessee women's basketball coach Rick Insell didn't want there to be any trash talking of the Blue Raiders closest competitor for the Conference USA crown.
"They're a good team; they're a good basketball team," Insell said of the Flames, who played MTSU in the CUSA title game as the No. 2 seed in the CUSA Tournament a season ago. "They're going to beat a lot of people and we're going to have to play them probably two or three more times."
Insell said he was instead focused on how proud he was of his team, how they survived a tough non-conference schedule and came out with energy in the first week of CUSA play against the two teams predicted to finish second and third behind them in the preseason poll back in October, teams that both won on the court of a much improved Western Kentucky team in the other half of their road trip this weekend.
But I'm not Rick Insell, so I can say this: the Blue Raiders made a statement with their dominance over the first weekend of CUSA play, holding two well regarded opponents who, whether through media commentary or CUSA coaches voting, were expected to give the Blue Raiders a run for their money, to an average of under 40 points per game. The two wins gave the Blue Raiders sole possession of the Conference USA record for most consecutive wins over CUSA opponents, with Saturday's win over the Flames being No. 31 to pass the 30 Rice put up between 2018-2020.
Insell did take the chance to acknowledge that milestone postgame.
"Rice is in the rear-view mirror," Insell said. "When you look at that record book five years from now, there won't be Rice, it will be Middle Tennessee. We were playing for history, the kids that were playing before us, today."
What's scariest about the defensive dominance of MTSU this weekend, scoring a combined 60 points off a combined 51 turnovers between the two games, is that Insell thought his team was not playing at the defensive level they should be.
"We can have nights where we're not shooting well, but if we don't have our defense, we're not going to make it where we want to be," said Jalynn Gregory, who led MTSU with 24 points with a 6-for-8 afternoon beyond the arc on Saturday.
Insell said that he graded out the MTSU defense up to this point in the season as a "four" out of 10. Perhaps chalk that up, in part, to a tough non-conference schedule that took MTSU across the country, from the Midwest to the West Coast to up the Eastern Seaboard. Gregory said that the defensive lapses at Princeton, the Blue Raiders' first game back from Christmas break, resulted in an increased point of emphasis in MTSU's defensive scheme during practice this week.
Some of defense is just the players having the want-to to play it, of course, as well as the physical ability of the players to stay in front and with their man, something Insell said Gregory, Courtney Blakely and Ta'Mia Scott all did particularly well on the perimeter on Saturday. But at MTSU, it's considerably more than that, as the scheme calls for high levels of communication to call out screen coverages, changes in assignments in transition and strong court awareness to rotate the help where it needs to be.
When the communication is working, that allows the Blue Raiders to be even more aggressive, denying teams the ability to even get into their set plays at times.
"We just put an emphasis on jumping the lines and getting in denials to get that type of stuff," Scott said. "It just shows we're that much better at our defense, especially tonight, because we're getting what we wanted."
Sitting courtside when the Blue Raiders are locked in, I can often hear Anastasiia Boldyreva calling out when she wants to ice a screen more clearly than I can hear Joe Fisher and Kyle Turnham on the radio broadcast right beside me. That was the case on Thursday and Saturday, where the communication shut nearly everything down for both the Panthers and the Flames.
But Rick Insell knows the standard has to be, must be, higher. Because while the Blue Raiders have already shown they're the class of Conference USA, the aspirations for the MTSU program are much higher than a third-straight title.
"Our rotations, we've got to be better," Insell said. "We're reacting after they catch the ball. We need to be reacting before they catch the ball and we're not in position. We're working on that. If we can get that down, we're going to be pretty tough."
