College basketball

Bulls regress as Red Storm ends 25-game road nightmare

USF follows two competitive losses to strong Big East foes with a 68-49 clunker against St. John's.

By GREG AUMAN
Published January 15, 2006

TAMPA - It could have gone down in history as USF's first Big East victory, but after a late first-half collapse, the only thing going down Saturday night was a two-year, 25-game road losing streak for St. John's.

The Red Storm, charter members of the Big East, were pleased to meet the league's newest arrival, pulling away their most lopsided league win in four years, 68-49 before 4,456 at the Sun Dome.

"I told the guys it was like a monkey, and then I said a gorilla, off our backs," said Norm Roberts, previously winless on the road in two seasons as St. John's coach.

That gorilla landed on the Bulls, who share the Big East cellar with Providence as the only teams without a conference win. USF goes on the road to Georgetown and Seton Hall, hoping to stay in those games longer than Saturday.

Down 22-19 with 5:10 left in the first half, the Bulls (6-10, 0-3) put center Solomon Jones on the bench with two fouls. St. John's (8-6, 1-2) ended the half on an 11-0 run, and it got worse from there.

"The last 3-4 minutes there in the first half is when things got away," said USF coach Robert McCullum, whose team has lost seven of its past eight. "That's where things slipped away. ... We just never got anything going."

It was a horrid shooting night for the Bulls, with the starting trio of James Holmes, Melvin Buckley and Chris Capko hitting just one of their first 18 attempts. Holmes, the Bulls' leading scorer at 19.0 points a game, finished 1-for-14 for four points, and the Bulls hit one of 15 3-point attempts as a team.

Jones (17 points) was the only Bull to score in the first six minutes, then went scoreless for more than a half. That he finished with only four rebounds, none on the defensive end, was "kind of mindboggling," McCullum said.

"When (Holmes) and Melvin Buckley go 2-for-21, and as well as Solomon Jones played offensively, when he only gets four rebounds, this is going to be the outcome," McCullum said.

St. John's, 3-13 in Big East play last season, hadn't won on the road since a November 2003 trip to Stony Brook. The Bulls had played well in their first two Big East games, losing to West Virginia and Syracuse by a combined 10 points, but regressed Saturday.

"This definitely was a step back, because we didn't come out with any intensity to win tonight," Jones said. "Point blank, we just didn't play hard."

Holmes, who went 2-for-13 in a loss to West Virginia, struggled at home again.

"It was just one of them nights," Holmes said. "I had easy shots, good shots, but they just weren't falling tonight. They played great defense, but it was more a personal matter for me."

One bright spot for USF was junior forward McHugh Mattis, who had four dunks in a span of four minutes in the first half, finishing with 15 points and a game-high 10 rebounds.

The second-largest home crowd of the season cheered the return of sophomore guard Collin Dennis, who saw his first significant action since suffering an Achilles' tendon injury in the opener. Dennis played 19 minutes, going 2-for-8 with a team-high four turnovers.

St. John's, which outrebounded USF 39-28, got 13 points from freshman Anthony Mason Jr. and guard Eugene Lawrence, who added six assists and nine rebounds.

[Last modified January 15, 2006, 01:48:18]