BOX SCORE BREAKDOWN: JACKSONVILLE STATE
Four stats to explain Kennesaw State's conference opener, a much-needed win out of the CUSA starting blocks.
Kennesaw State is back to playing games that matter, as fun as it is to cross the continent three times during the non-conference slate and spend Thanksgiving in Alberta’s fourth-largest city. Saturday night’s victory - an 83-71 knockout over Jacksonville State - felt pretty cathartic after a 2-12 stretch run and first-round tourney exit that capped the ASUN farewell tour in 2024.
Welcome to the slightly bigger leagues of Conference USA. Scoreboard check: Very good. Vibes check: Pretty good, too. What about the actual numbers? After locking myself in the data lab (browsing KenPom and CBB Analytics), let’s take a look at a few of the underlying stats and figure out what we can learn from the CUSA debut.
Turnover Rate: 14.7%, down from the 22.1% season average
(I’ve noticed a few differences in comparing TO rate across different analytic resources, based on how they scrub play-by-play data or factor the number. For continuity’s sake, we’ll use KenPom on this one.)
Coming into the CUSA opener, only one team in the entire nation forced turnovers less often than Jacksonville State’s 10% rate. That matchup - especially at home - felt like a now-or-never situation for an Owls offense that faced their own struggles holding on to the ball. By default, one team had to figure it out on that end of the court, and it was the Owls putting together season-best performances in turnover rate (14.7%) and assist-to-turnover ratio (1.5).
Take care of the ball, even at a slightly below-average average level (17.7% for the NCAA), and KSU can still endure unimpressive shooting nights. When the Owls limit giveaways to a sub-20% TO rate, they’re 4-1 against D1 teams. If those empty possessions stack up more than 20% of the time, the record is just 2-4.
That’s why you read this website: Brave, unprecedented takes like “It’s easier to win if you don’t give the ball to your opponent.”
Did the Owls cure an ongoing issue or just treat the symptom against a team that can’t get takeaways against anyone? Probably somewhere in between, even in an optimistic reading of the stat. They’re still narrowly at the bottom of CUSA’s turnover rankings, even factoring Saturday’s improvement. We’ll find out more in our 100 Miles of Hate road trip: MTSU and WKU both feature defenses that are much, much more efficient than KSU saw in the league debut.
Jax State’s season-worst Effective FG% performance
Pettway talked postgame about the importance of holding Gamecocks star Jaron Pierre Jr. in check early. Job well done there - and pretty much everywhere else - when looking at JSU’s shooting numbers. JPJ made his first field goal 12 minutes into the game, and overall, JSU posted their worst eFG% night of the season at just 41.4%.
It wasn’t just Pierre struggling early - the rest of the Gamecocks couldn’t get much going anywhere but the foul line. They went 33% from inside the arc before the break, then shot 2 of 16 from deep while chasing the game in the second half.
Here’s Jacksonville State’s full shot chart from CBB Analytics. You can pick out certain issues for this Kennesaw team defensively (more on that later), but from a shot quality perspective, Pettway will love seeing this kind of performance.
Jamil Miller, who pitched in 11 points, 6 boards, and 3 assists of his own, took on the JPJ assignment before the Owls mostly pivoted to the 1-3-1 matchup zone in the second half. That’s a VERY high-leverage role against a player who takes nearly a third of Jacksonville State’s shots and scores around 23 points per game, good for third nationally.
Miller looked up for the task, often picking up JPJ at the logo and making life very difficult for JSU’s senior guard. One way that showed up in the advanced box score: Three fewer attempts for Pierre in the combined rim + paint zone compared to his season average, despite only managing 2-7 from long-range. The space just really wasn’t there unless the Gamecocks hunted a switch. Pierre finished with 20+ for the eighth time this season, but he had just 12 points prior to a late flurry around the under-4 timeout after Kennesaw opened up a double-digit lead.
The domino effect of Miller handling Pierre is that Wooley doesn’t have to worry about facilitating the offense and guarding the opponent’s primary scorer. He’s capable of handling that responsibility, but it’s not a stretch to connect the reduced defensive load with the fact that Wooley committed just 3 fouls and only turned it over twice.
That game plays out much differently if Pierre and the rest of the Gamecocks find a rhythm with some early buckets. Would the Owls survive their own slow start on offense and the 10-0 run that JSU put together right before halftime?
Media timeout: We need to know what they were reading courtside.
I like to think Mack showed Overton how to sign up for Hootmail. You should also do that before the second edition, an MTSU/Western Kentucky preview, arrives in Gmail inboxes all around the globe.
Offensive rebound rate: KSU 45.5%, Jax State 25.6%
I’m just noticing that the first three stats are all Four Factors, already established for 20 years as the best ways to analyze a team’s performance. Really insightful stuff from me this week. I’ll try to do better next time.
In a game dominated by missed shots, Kennesaw State cleaned up the glass and grabbed 45.5% of the rebounds on the offensive end and nearly 75% of them on the defensive end. This wasn’t a situation like turnovers where the Owls took advantage of a glaring Jacksonville State weakness, either. The Gamecocks led CUSA teams in opponent ORB% and are middle of the pack grabbing their own rebounds.
Rongie Gordon, in a vintage Rongie Gordon performance, finished with 2 points, a team-leading 4 assists, and 12 boards - six of which came on the offensive end. By himself, Gordon by himself did as good a job on the offensive glass as whichever 5 players were on the court for Jacksonville State - with the Owls forward matching the 25% of the Gamecocks’ full team.
Assuming Saturday’s 45.5% number (higher than the national leader’s average) isn’t sustainable, can the Owls still maintain an offensive rebounding rate that hovers around the Top 50 in the nation at 34.4%? That’s been enough to put them on top of the CUSA rankings, and gives the Owls more second-chance points per game than everyone outside New Mexico State.
We should also note that the rebounding happened with transfer center Andre Weir playing just 7 minutes on the night due to foul trouble. I’ve been curious about a more frequent Death Lineup with Braedan Lue at the 5, whatever that means in the current system. That idea becomes way more realistic when you see defensive/rebounding numbers like the Owls had against Jacksonville State.
PERSONAL FOUL EFFICIENCY: .35
If you could pick out an analytics check engine light for this Owls team, I’d point to Personal Foul Efficiency. Think of it as a risk-reward metric, like a defensive equivalent to assist-turnover ratio. The basic formula: Steals plus blocks, divided by personal fouls. Are your fouls worth the gamble? Right now, the answer: Not really, even if it hasn’t caused major problems yet.
A .47 personal foul efficiency puts the Owls at 292 in the nation, a mile off the pace of how well the defense has performed in eFG% (60th nationally) overall and 3P% (15th). They’re often forcing tough shots and getting misses, just not the takeaways.
You can mess around with the create-a-chart tool on CBB Analytics (where I pulled the PFE metric) to give a decent visual of CUSA’s teams in comparison to the national landscape.
Saturday night’s 0.35 personal foul efficiency dipped into the danger zone for this Owls team. The win-loss splits on PFE line up almost identically to the results you see with Turnover Rate. In this instance: finish lower than 0.50, and they’re 2-4. Take more than a half steal or block for each personal foul, and KSU has gone 4-1.
Kennesaw’s defense ranks 327 in turnover percentage via KenPom, who also tracks fouls/40 minutes down to the individual level. Of the six qualifying Owls (40% or more of minutes), four of them are in the bottom third of the 65-man list. Only Simeon Cottle (17th) and Miller (18th) managed to make the top 20.
To round out the KSU rotation in fouls/committed per 40 minutes:
Andre Weir - 7.5
Frankquon Sherman - 5.1
Ramone Seals - 2.9 (something to monitor, I think)
Delaney Heard - 1.1
We’ve talked about the foul-heavy nature for the last two seasons, even after swapping out all but three contributors from last year’s squad. That’s just the reality of how the Owls play. I’m not sure Pettway wants the fouls to fully disappear, anyway. He talks a lot about being “nasty” on defense, and that’s a side effect of the physicality he prefers. I’m sure he’d like the Owls to get their money’s worth, though.