The Jekyll-Hyde classic is a study of good and extreme bad in one person with a split personality.
And that was the story of the Flyers’ 71-68 loss to Loyola, which came into the game as, statistically at least, the worst team in the Atlantic 10.
For much of the game, the Ramblers dominated, confused and embarrassed the Flyers.
Although UD did make an epic fourth-quarter comeback — scoring 19 straight points — its chance to tie the game in the final seconds ended the way most of the contest went — on a self-inflicted turnover.
The Flyers — who lead the league in turnovers — committed a whopping 30 of them against the Ramblers.
Most exasperating, as coach Tamika Williams-Jeter noted afterward, was that “most of the time there was no pressure. It was just us throwing the ball away.”
Add on the facts that the Flyers were 0-for-7 from three-point range up to the final seconds of the third quarter and that they gave up 71 points to a team that averages 52.5 points per game, worst in the league, and you see why UD trailed by 22 near the end of the third quarter and led only 48 seconds in the game.
Although Loyola is not known for its defense, UD point guard Nicole Stephens said the Ramblers’ ever-changing defensive schemes befuddled them early on:
“Their different defenses — a 1-3-1, a 2-3, a man, a diamond — they just threw us off and we got sped up. We just kind of got flustered and panicked a little bit.”
This is the same Flyers team that beat now 11-5 Kansas in a Thanksgiving tournament in Florida. But if that was the high point this year, Wednesday night was low tide.
It was the worst loss of the season for the now 8-7 Flyers.
Cruel irony
Yet for all the Mr. Hyde badness, the Flyers wondrously transformed back into the good Dr. Jekyll for the fourth quarter as they staged a furious comeback.
Loyola, which came into the game 4-10 and was last in the league in almost every category you can think of — including scoring offense, scoring margins, field goal percentage, three-point percentage, free throw percentage, rebounding margin — suddenly reverted into its old self and froze up in the final 10 minutes.
Just before the fourth quarter began, as the five UD players huddled on the court by themselves, point guard Nicole Stephens — who graduated from Columbia before transferring here last season — said she turned her attention to 6-foot-3 junior forward Ajok Madol, who had started her career at Minnesota:
“We needed to turn up the aggressiveness and I told Ajok, ‘I need you to get some big steals for us.’
“And that’s exactly what she did and that kind of set the tone for the fourth quarter. We all fed off that and kind of got after it.”
Madol — who finished with a team-high 14 points, but also had seven turnovers as did Nayo Lear — stole the ball twice from Loyola and as Stephens said, the Flyers then did “get after it.”
In the team’s stirring surge back to respectability, Stephens and Lear each scored eight fourth quarter points and sophomore guard Olivia Leung had six.
Leung made a pair of fourth quarter 3-pointers, as well as one to end the third quarter.
After being down 61-39 with 20 seconds left in the third quarter, the Flyers had cut the deficit to two points with under a minute left.
They trailed by three when they readied to inbound the ball under their own basket with 9.6 seconds left.
In cruel irony, the glorious comeback ended on another unforced turnover.
Asked what happened, Leung said: “No comment.”
Stephens, who inbounded the ball, said it was “just a miscommunication between Liv and I. I saw one thing and she thought she saw another.”
Williams-Jeter said the play called for Stephens to inbounds the ball to Leung cutting to the basket and that’s the pass she threw. But she said Leung thought she saw a different opening and drifted another way.
The pass ended up going out of bounds.
Lear finished with 13 points; Stephens had 11 and Leung 10.
‘This was a tough one’
“We’re a better team than this,” Leung said afterward. “We shouldn’t be a team that needs to come back from a 20-point deficit.
“That fourth quarter showed who we really are. But we have to play that way all four quarters.”
She said the problem through much of the game was “mental lapses.”
To rectify that she said they need the correct mental approach “right from the jump” and she said that attitude begins in practice.
Williams-Jeter referenced that as well afterward:
“This was a tough one ... and after the game (some of them) are out there signing autographs when we just lost to Loyola of Chicago.”
The Flyers face a daunting schedule in the final seven weeks of the season. Six of the 14 teams they meet already have won at least 10 games and two other opponents — including Loyola again February 25 — already have beaten them.
As she stood outside the dressing room Wednesday night, Stephens was asked what the focus of the postgame conversation between the players and Williams-Jeter had been.
With a succinct, but telling paraphrase, she said: “At this point, all we can do is learn from this.”
Then she added: “But looking back, I think this loss is going to haunt us.”
And that too sums up the “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
About the Author