By Dan Weber
NKyTribune sports reporter
It’s nights like these when college athletes earn those NIL dollars teams are allowed to pay players now.
As the NKU Norse did on the fourth and final season-opening road game of the season at Saint Louis, where the homestanding Billikens of the Atlantic 10 put a 125-63 hurting on the now 2-2 Norse. That’s the all-time record Division 1 loss for an NKU team.
“It’s pretty simple,” NKU coach Darrin Horn said afterward on the FM 107 postgame show, “the fourth game in eight days.” And the last two – at Texas A&M and Saint Louis – in games Horn calls “buy” games for the income guarantees they provide a mid-major program like NKU with power conference teams buying a home game.
And all away from home requiring more than 4,000 miles of travel from Highland Heights to Sioux Falls, S.D. to Vermillion, S.D. to Houston, Tex., then on to College Station and back home for a day before heading out to St. Louis and back the last two days.
“We didn’t show a lot of fight,” Horn said of a game that pretty much had the Norse never in it, trailing 25-10 early, then 56-24 at halftime. In falling behind early, NKU’s two leading scorers, guards Willie Foster and Eric Acker, missed their first 11 shots on the way to five and nine points respectively on a combined five of 27 shooting.
“You knew this was going to happen (to Foster, averaging 23.0 points a game),” Horn said, “he’s a freshman. But we need more out of (senior) Eric (Acker).”
Horn continued: “A lot of guys didn’t play with the level of poise we need . . . on either end. It’s frustrating, that lack of poise. . . . we have a lot of work to do.”
Only two Norse finished in double figures led by BJ Davis-Ray, a St. Louis native and transfer from SMU, who scored 13 points. Noah Pagotta, one of NKU’s three Australians, added 10 points.
The 2-2 Norse head home for their Saturday home opener against Central Michigan in an afternoon game (3:30 p.m.) “It’ll be great to have a big crowd for the tipoff at The Heights,” Horn said.
But against a Saint Louis team that had 14 of its 16 players score and five of them in double figures, there was no mystery about the outcome of this one as the Billikens shot 58.7 percent (44 of 75) from the field to NKU’s 32.9 (24 of 73).
Kentucky kids combine for Kansas to blast Kentucky
In the finale of the Champions Classic in Chicago Tuesday, a pair of Kentucky freshmen combined to lead Kansas, the all-time second-winningest college basketball program in history, to an 89-69 romp over all-time No. 1 Kentucky.
Taylen Kinney, a 6-3 freshman point guard from Newport, ran the KU offense in his 33 minutes on the floor, second-highest for the Jayhawks, with a game-high eight assists. A number of those went to fellow Kentucky freshman, 6-8 Tyran Stokes of Louisville, who scored 23 points for a Jayhawk team that surged at the end of the first half for a 46-36 edge at intermission and pretty much never looked back.
And while Kinney didn’t have a great shooting night with four points on one-of-nine shooting, his passing was outstanding.
“He’s got speed, a high IQ and is going to be a really good player,” ESPN analyst Jay Bilas said of Kinney. “He may be just a freshman but he makes really good decisions . . . and his shot will come around.”
For Kinney fans from Northern Kentucky, Taylen will be here Tues., Jan. 19 for a Big 12 Conference game against Cincinnati that will tip off at 7:30 p.m. at Fifth-Third Arena
The win moves Kansas to 2,441 all-time to Kentucky’s 2,446.