Preview: UAB Hosts Struggling Tulsa
Coming off yet another frustrating loss, the Blazers (7-7, 0-1) welcome conference bottom-feeder Tulsa (6-8, 0-1) to Bartow Arena.
Game Information
UAB (7-7, KenPom #134) vs. Tulsa (6-8, KenPom #264)
📅: Saturday, January 4th, 2025
🕒: 1:00 PM CST
🏟️: Birmingham, Alabama — Bartow Arena
📺: ESPN+
📻: WJQX 100.5 FM
Trends and Odds
UAB enters the afternoon at 7-7 (0-1) overall, having suffered one of its most improbable losses of the Kennedy era on Tuesday. The Blazers allowed a North Texas team that plays at the seventh-slowest pace in the country to erase an 18-point deficit in fewer than 14 minutes. UNT’s Atin Wright missed what would’ve been a game-winning runner against the Blazers when he was at Drake last season; this time, he drained an improbable buzzer-beating three-pointer to send the Green and Gold home empty-handed.
The Blazers have now blown four leads of 18 or more points over the last calendar year: Tuesday at North Texas, December 15th vs. Arkansas State, March 3rd at Memphis, and January 23rd at Charlotte. UAB’s current run of bad fortune stands alone among D1 basketball teams.
Only 11 men’s teams have blown multiple leads of 18+ points since January 1st, 2024, and none have done it more times than the Blazers.
Despite losing to UNT, the Blazers have moved up six KenPom spots from the beginning of the week; however, their #134 ranking still places them sixth among American teams.
Tulsa enters the afternoon at 6-8 overall, with all of their wins having come against either non-D1 teams or teams sub-300 in KenPom. Eric Konkol’s squad dropped its conference opener to Rice on Wednesday and has lost eight of its last 11. The Golden Hurricane rank 264th in KenPom, good for the worst mark in the AAC by a long shot.
UAB is 6-1 against teams 200th or worse in KenPom; in fact, all of the Blazers’ D1 wins have come against such opponents. Tulsa, on the other hand, is 0-3 against teams in the KenPom top 150. They’ve suffered blowout losses to Oklahoma State, Loyola Chicago, and UCF.
FanDuel gives the Blazers a 90.48% implied probability of beating Tulsa and has set the spread at UAB -12.5, while KenPom gives the Blazers an 84% probability of beating Tulsa and predicts a final score of UAB 85, TU 74.
Series History
UAB holds a 10-7 all-time record against Tulsa, although the Blazers have dominated the series since 2012. Tulsa has never won in Birmingham.
UAB first met Tulsa in 1990 in the first round of the All-College Basketball Classic, an annual holiday tournament hosted in Oklahoma City. At the time, the Golden Hurricane were led by J.D. Barnett, with whom the Blazers were intimately familiar from his six-year stint at VCU. Barnett was legendary for his intensity, throwing up before games and punching holes in blackboards at halftime; he would prove as fiery as ever on this day. A technical foul received by the wildly gesticulating Tulsa coach propelled UAB to a 10-point second half lead.
To Gene Bartow’s fury, the Green and Gold proceeded to waste the game away, missing 11 crucial free throws attempts down the stretch. UAB finished the night just 26 of 41 from the charity stripe. Despite a 27-point effort from Andy Kennedy, the Blazers suffered a 92-86 loss.
“This team has got some incredible, incredible problems trying to win games at the end,” said Bartow. “Missing free throws in key spots, turning the ball over… This team is going to be tough to deal with.”
UAB and Tulsa would meet a few more times throughout the decade, with the Golden Hurricane taking three of five games from the Blazers. The juggernaut Bill Self-coached 1999 TU squad handed UAB an 88-73 loss.
The parity would continue when the programs became conference rivals in 2006. The Blazers won the teams’ first three Conference USA matchups; the Golden Hurricane took the next three. All of Tulsa’s wins during this stretch were soul-crushers, as TU eliminated UAB from the 2008 and 2009 C-USA tournaments and won the teams’ January 2009 meeting on a buzzer-beater.
The tide finally began to turn in 2010, when a 16-3 Tulsa team crowned by some as the successor to Calipari’s Memphis visited Birmingham. In front of a rowdy Bartow Arena crowd, the 25th-ranked Blazers took home a thriller over the Golden Hurricane, holding TU star Justin Hurtt to just two points.
Tulsa beat UAB a year later, but that game marks their most recent victory over the Blazers — since 2012, the Green and Gold are 4-0 against TU. Bizarrely, each of the teams’ three most recent meetings has been decided by a final score of 70-63.
PJ Haggerty and company gave UAB a scare last season, staying within striking distance as late as the U4 media timeout, but sloppy Golden Hurricane offense and superb Blazer free throw shooting down the stretch secured Andy Kennedy’s squad the victory.
Tulsa Scouting Report
Three years ago, Eric Konkol left behind the Louisiana Tech winning machine and headed west, returning to the program at which he began his coaching career in 2000. The rationale for the move is still not entirely clear — over seven seasons in Ruston, Konkol led his team to five top-three conference finishes while never posting a losing record — but his hiring was widely seen as a coup for Tulsa, a once-proud program that had fallen dormant under then-head coach Frank Haith.
Things didn’t quite go as planned in Konkol’s inaugural 2022-2023 campaign. The Golden Hurricane were an absolute disaster, finishing the year with an abysmal record of 5-25 and winning just a single American game. It was undoubtedly Tulsa’s worst team of the KenPom era (1996-present) and perhaps the worst team in program history.
During the following season, Tulsa jumped from 316th in KenPom to 184th thanks to an influx of new players. Former Louisiana Tech Bulldog Cobe Williams, former Charlotte 49er Jared Garcia, former Michigan Wolverine Isaiah Barnes, JUCO transfer Carlous Williams, freshman Tyshawn Archie, and freshman Matt Reed all contributed to the Golden Hurricane’s renaissance, but TCU import PJ Haggerty took the cake. He was unanimously named the AAC’s Freshman of the Year after averaging 21.2 points, 5.5 rebounds, 3.8 assists, and 1.9 steals per game.
Many of those players are gone — Haggerty and both Williamses moved on over the offseason. Nevertheless, many prognosticators thought Eric Konkol’s 2024-2025 squad had the potential to build on the promise of last year and finally finish in the upper half of the AAC.
That breakthrough is nowhere to be found. Tulsa’s campaign has been nothing short of disastrous: after a 3-0 start, they’ve won two of their last seven games. The Golden Hurricane has dropped 103 spots in KenPom since the season began, the fifth-most of any Division 1 team. Despite facing one of the nation’s weakest non-conference schedules — one that rivals even UAB’s in softness — Tulsa has strung together just four D1 wins, losing to a SWAC team and a moribund Georgia State in the process.
The Golden Hurricane’s backcourt is primarily manned by guards Tyshawn Archie and Dwon Odom. The returner Archie, a 2024 AAC All-Freshman Team selection, honed his craft while playing backup to Cobe Williams last season. The newcomer Odom spent the 2023-2024 campaign at Georgia State.
Archie is a quick, twitchy distributor who is also capable of applying disruptive ball pressure and pushing the pace in transition, but according to hoop-math, he’s been among the least efficient scoring ballhandlers in the AAC this season. Archie attempts nearly as many field goals per game as Haggerty did last year, with 75% of his shots coming either at the rim or from beyond the three-point line, but he makes a middling 59.4% of his dunks/layups and hits triples at an underwhelming 27.8% clip.
A consensus top-60 recruit in 2020, Odom was a member of a highly-touted class of Atlanta-area high school guards that included Eric Gaines; like Gaines, Odom originally signed with a high-major program, spending the opening stanza of his career at Xavier. He transferred back home to Georgia State in 2022, where he averaged 12.4 points and 4.3 assists per game over two years. After graduating from GSU, Odom decided to use his final season of eligibility at Tulsa.
Despite being coached by three different staffs, the veteran Odom has remained much the same player over the course of his career. He’s an excellent distributor: this year, his assist rate is over 30, a mark which places him among the top 70 players in the country. He’s a capable downhill scorer: this year, nearly 35% of his total shot diet has consisted of layups and dunks, of which he’s made an impressive 72.7%. He’s a productive on-ball defender: this year, he sports a respectable steal rate of 2.0%.
Odom’s fatal flaw is his complete inability to shoot three-pointers — he’s harmless as a catch-and-shoot threat. If you’re beginning to notice a pattern, you’re right to do so. Although Tulsa is one of 50 most three-point oriented teams in the country, they field almost no consistent long-range shooters.
The exception to this rule is wing Keaston Willis, who many of you might remember from his time at Louisiana Tech. Willis transferred to Tulsa in 2023 but missed almost the entirely of last season with a foot injury; now healthy, he’s back to being essentially the same player he was at Tech. Willis is a volume three-point shooter currently making 36.8% of his triples, right in line with his career mark of 37.6%. Konkol utilizes him as the team’s primary catch-and-shoot threat and little else: Willis attempts fewer than two two-pointers per game.
Forwards Braeden Carrington and Justin Amadi man the frontcourt alongside centers Ian Smikle and Matt Reed — capable interior defender Jared Garcia is out for the year and productive forward Isaiah Barnes has been out for several weeks with a hand injury.
Carrington, a Minnesota transfer, is a good, disruptive defender who boasts the team’s highest steal rate — his problem? You guessed it: he’s 19-75 from beyond the arc, good for a rate of 25.3%. The single worst volume shooter in the AAC per hoop-math, Carrington also isn’t an interior scoring threat, having attempted just 19 two-pointers this year (even fewer than Willis!).
Amadi, a James Madison transfer, is another good defender and a solid rebounder; however, he’s perhaps the least versatile scorer on the team. Amadi is completely confined to the rim and the paint on offense, where he’s been a below-average finisher. He’s also saddled with the lowest assist rate of any Golden Hurricane player. Amadi’s penchant for drawing fouls has kept him relevant in the rotation, but the injuries to Garcia and Barnes have really restricted Tulsa’s options.
Smikle is Konkol’s go-to option at center; 2024 AAC All-Freshman Team selection Reed serves as his backup. Both men are 6’10” and roughly 235 pounds. Smikle is an excellent rebounder who only attempts shots at the rim, while Reed is another good rebounder capable of knocking down a three-pointer. Smikle is the better defender, and Reed is the better scorer, although neither is a particularly dynamic offensive threat.
The combined offensive limitations of Carrington, Amadi, Smikle, and Reed force almost all of the Golden Hurricane’s offense to route through the backcourt.
To round out Tulsa’s rotation:
G Jaye Nash and G Jesaiah McWright
Nash was recently named the American Freshman of the Week for his 10-assist performance against Southwestern Christian, while McWright made 4/5 three-pointers in the same game. Backups to Archie, Odom, and Willis, it would be surprising if either man sees more than 10 minutes today.
The lineup we’re going to see most often is Archie, Odom, Willis, Carrington, and Smikle — Konkol has put that group on the floor for over 25% of possible minutes during the last five games.
Outlook
If UAB falls today, it would mark almost indisputably the worst loss of the Kennedy era. UAB hasn’t been defeated by a team ranked 264th or lower in KenPom since January 23rd, 2020, when 5-14 Southern Miss beat the Blazers in Bartow Arena.
On paper, the Green and Gold should take this one. Although the downhill attacking tandem of Odom and Archie could give the Blazers trouble, and Willis has tended to shoot well in his five career games against UAB, it’s hard to see the path through which the Golden Hurricane could stop UAB from scoring.
The Green and Gold will enjoy a pronounced frontcourt advantage and likely a pronounced shot volume advantage: Tulsa gives up offensive rebounds at a bottom-100 rate in the country, while UAB grabs them at the 11th-highest rate in the country. Tulsa also rarely forces turnovers, while UAB rarely commits them. Even if the Blazers suffer a cold shooting night, they’ll have ample offensive opportunities. Sans a three-point explosion, the Golden Hurricane will struggle to keep pace with their hosts.