The Louisiana Ragin’ Cajuns lost their final away game of the season to the Southern Miss Golden Eagles on Feb. 24. The Cajuns struggled on offense all game and led at no point past the first-minute mark as the Eagles coasted to a fairly comfortable 82–71 win.
The Cajuns had a chance to come back late in the game as they pulled to within five points with five minutes remaining, but Eagles senior guards Andre Curbelo and Mo Arnold stepped up with back-to-back 3-pointers to help shut the door.
This, along with losses to Appalachian State and UL Monroe, marks three consecutive losses for Cajuns basketball for a 9–7 conference record and a plummet to five games back of No. 1-seeded App State in the Sun Belt standings.
It’s terrible timing for this kind of slump, as the team is in a dead heat for the No. 4 seed which would give the team a bye week in the SBC Tournament.
So why has the team struggled to put up 80 points in a contest, which so far in 2024 has locked in a win every time?
Kobe Julien is still in a shooting slump. He has continued to struggle in the three losses, hitting 14-of-39 shots from the field in those matches, including 1–10 on 3-point shots.
At the end of the day, the Cajuns don’t have a consistent 3-point offense at all. When they try to shoot a typical amount of threes, it looks bad. In all three losses they’ve tried to put up an effort on that front and they’ve only gotten close-to-acceptable returns on investment once.
“We didn’t shoot the ball well, we’re 1-for-10 from three,” said head coach Bob Marlin during a Feb. 19 press conference.
“We’ve gotta get Kentrell [Garnett], Kobe, and Joe [Charles] shooting the ball like they’re capable of shooting it. We had open looks, we just didn’t make them,” Marlin said.
After making strides in rebounding efficiency lately, the Cajuns also got crushed on that end in the Southern Miss game, 46–29, which allowed the Eagles a whopping 24 second-chance points.
Even forward Hosana Kitenge couldn’t get much of his usual rhythm going against the Eagles’ defense, managing just 2–7 and five rebounds, way below his standard production. Joe Charles had the hot hand in the game, going 10–18 with seven rebounds.
Fans aren’t looking at players after this disappointment, though. Coach Marlin has been the target of much of the criticism among fans, as his comments about free-throw discrepancy in games have been picked apart repeatedly online.
“We did what we needed to do against App State, we rebounded the ball well, shot free throws well, but unfortunately, we only shot five, and they got 17,” said Marlin during that same Feb. 19 press conference.
“That’s the eighth time since I’ve been here that a team has had less than 10 fouls against us… It’s happened eight times in 14 years, and then three times this year,” said Marlin.
Marlin recognized the lost opportunity with the loss to App State: “The App game was important for a lot of reasons. We’ve had a lot of success there, they’ve only beaten us one time in Boone and one time here in Lafayette. They haven’t been here since ‘19, so five years. We will play them next season.”
“We felt like if we ran the table, you’d have a chance to win and you’d automatically be third, but it would hang a loss on those guys. So everybody else in the conference was pulling for us,” Marlin said.
With just two games left in this team’s season and the race for the bye out of their hands, the focus must be on putting up the best performances possible in the Cajundome against Troy on Feb. 28 and Southern Mississippi on March 1.