Defense smothers Air Force

The Falcons are a pesky team. With their dribble penetration drives, back-door cuts, 3-point step back shots, screens, picks on offense, their physical recipe is even tougher on defense where they like to stage a wrestling match.

That’s why BYU’s blowout victory over Air Force on Saturday night was so telling. You beat Air Force by 8 to 10 points and it is like a 15 to 20 point win over most any other team. They slow it down, limit posessions and usually defend pretty good. But when a team spanks the Falcons by 19 points after leading by 32, well, that’s atomic.

Trent Plaisted scored 20 points and Jonathan Tavernari scored 12 points in 11 minutes in the second half as the Cougars got win number 23 on the season and No. 46 in a row at the Marriott Center with the AFA win.

The impressive thing about this victory wasn’t how well the Cougar shot from inside out, but the defense. AFA is a tough defend. Lazy teams get eaten alive by AFA’s Princeton style offense and usually give up a lot of layins off drives.

But the Cougars slowed down the Falcons, forced bad shots and then in the second half, after making some adjustments, really put the net over the Falcons, leading to the 37-7 run and blouout 32 point advantage.

That margin of separation against the Falcons is very unusual the past half dozen years.