Yet a little more on John Bryant

At the risk of turning this into John Bryant's personal blog, here's a few more thoughts:

Embarrassing as it can sometimes be, confession is good for the soul. With that in mind, comes our admission that we somehow left out the major point of our previous post about Santa Clara center John Bryant's points, shots taken, the distance of them and from what side of the court.

That point being, how well he was defensed Wednesday night.

Now we can imagine some jaws may be dropping right about now but consider this with an open mind: yes, Bryant scored 20 points but needed 15 shots (a fourth of Santa Clara's total) and six made free throws in order to do so. Plus, none of his attempts were outside of 10 feet and he enjoyed a bountiful number of picks to get the position from which to launch his shots.

He also committed six turnovers and SJSU's defensive harassment has to be credited with 'aiding' in some of those.

Also factor in the dramatic height and weight advantage Bryant enjoyed.

The bottomline is there is only so much one can do against a player the size and talent of Bryant. Preventing him from moving into an offensive 'comfort zone' spot on the floor comes down to a short period of 'mixed martial arts lite' before the referees will feel the need to whistle for a foul and then it's usually a charge assigned to the defender.

The Broncos also did a decent job of rotating the ball from side to side thereby forcing those opposing Bryant to have to fight in re-establishing defensive position again and again as the big man moved from right to left and vice versa across the key.

We actually think Bryant enjoyed a better performance at the defensive end because the Spartan 'bigs' struggled all night to get even a decent offensive look.

*** We were also by informed by Spartan Associate Sports Information Director Amy Villa that a shot missed due to a foul called on the defender does not count in the shot total, thus accounting for our shot total discrepancy. Thank you Amy for filling us in on that aspect.