UC Irvine Takes a Step Back in San Jose : Anteaters Are Thoroughly Outplayed in 71-55 PCAA Loss to Spartans

UC Irvine’s 1985-86 basketball season has been a soft-shoe routine in which nearly each step forward has been followed by a giant leap back. The result has been a team which appears to be running in place, and going no where.

The Anteaters made their West Coast television debut Sunday afternoon. Irvine players might have preferred to have this telecast preempted by reruns of the Mary Tyler Moore Show.

San Jose State outplayed Irvine to record a 71-55, Pacific Coast Athletic Assn. win in front of 2,407 spectators in the San Jose Civic Auditorium. About the only consolation for UCI is that the game wasn’t played in prime time.

The Anteaters haven’t been more than two games above the .500 mark all season, and Sunday’s loss struck another blow for mediocrity. UCI is 6-4 in PCAA play, 10-9 overall.

Senior forward Johnny Rogers led an inoffensive Irvine offense with 15 points, then wondered if the Anteaters would ever stop plunging headlong into valleys after reaching modest peaks.

“For this time of year, it’s sad,” he said. “I thought we were peaking. The season’s two-thirds over. We should be peaking.”

But Sunday’s debacle made the Anteaters look more middle-of-the-pack than a team chasing Nevada Las Vegas and New Mexico State for the conference lead.

“I thought it was a good game to be on TV,” UCI Coach Bill Mulligan said with more than a trace of sarcasm. “Now, every kid in Orange County and L.A. will say, ‘I want to go to Irvine. They need players.’ ”

Sarcasm aside, this wasn’t exactly the type of game Mulligan and his team would like to have had exposed to television cameras.

The Anteaters shot 36% (18 of 50) from the field, committed 19 turnovers and suffered through a stretch of ineptness that lasted from the middle of the first half to midway through the second.

With the score tied at 20-20, San Jose State (6-5, 13-7) outscored UCI, 16-9 over the finals seven minutes of the first half to take a 36-29, halftime lead.

Any adjustments Irvine made at halftime failed miserably.

The Anteaters were outscored, 16-2, over the first 10 minutes of the second half. It adds up to a span of about 17 minutes in which UCI was outscored, 32-11.

“They killed us,” Rogers said. “That’s all there is to it. They just killed us.”

Ricky Berry, the Spartans’ leading scorer, was playing with a flu bug that kept him out of practice on Friday and Saturday. He came off the bench to hit 7 of 10 shots and finish with a game-high 17 points. Forward Reggie Owens and center Gerald Thomas combined for 21 points and 17 rebounds and, more important, thoroughly frustrate Irvine forward Tod Murphy.

Murphy, who entered the game averaging 20.9 points per game, was held to 8 points on 3-of-12 shooting. His first field goal came at the 9:35 mark of the second half. It was only the second time this season that Murphy failed to score in double figures.

According to Thomas, the Spartan game plan included plenty of emphasis on defending Rogers and Murphy.

“The plan was to not let them get the ball, and if they did, leave them nothing to do with it,” he said.

It certainly worked against Murphy, who had his least productive game since a four-point nonperformance in a 53-48 loss to Fresno State on Jan. 9. Murphy was surrounded by Spartans nearly every time he got the ball.

“Frustrating?” he asked. “Yeah, it’s very frustrating. Everywhere you turn, you’re bumping into a body. Sometimes (a foul) is called, but most of the time, it’s not.

It makes it a little difficult to do anything.”

But Murphy wasn’t alone in his frustration. Mulligan cringed when he surveyed the stat sheet and saw that Murphy, Rogers and Troy Carmon--the Anteaters’ starting front court--had combined to shoot 9 of 33 from the field. Starting guards Scott Brooks and Joe Buchanan made 5 of 12 shots.

All of this against a team UCI had beaten, 72-67, one month earlier in a PCAA opener in Crawford Hall. San Jose State Coach Bill Berry said the intensity of guards Ward Farris and Ontario Johnson accounted for much of the difference in the rematch. Farris and Johnson had 19 points and 5 steals between them. Farris added a game-high eight assists.

“We watched the film from the first game, and I think the guards saw themselves and obviously felt they could play an awful lot harder,” Berry said. “I don’t think we had any real lulls there.”

Said Mulligan, pointing to a familiar Irvine weakness: “They just came at us. They’ve got really good quickness, and that seems to bother us.”

Mulligan has some cause for optimism in that the Anteaters seem to bounce back from defeats such as this one. A 53-48 loss to Fresno State was followed by an 83-75 win over the University of the Pacific. A 66-54 setback to Cal State Fullerton preceded a 99-88 win over UC Santa Barbara.

But that’s the Anteaters’ problem--one step forward and one slide back.