Bones Hyland will lead VCU Basketball to an upset win over Oregon Ducks

Winning the Offensive Rebounding Battle

One interesting dynamic in this game is that neither Oregon nor VCU has any rotational players taller than 6’9”, so rebounding will likely come down to which team wants it more. Allowing teams to pull down too many offensive rebounds has been a problem this season for the Rams — they’re just 289th in the nation and of the worst teams in the field in that regard.

That stat obviously hasn’t meant death for them, but it could against a team like Oregon. The Ducks play at a patient tempo (242nd in America) and like to find open threes towards the back-end of the shot clock. It will be hard enough for the Rams to stifle their first attempt on any given possession, but downright demoralizing to have great stops negated by successful second attempts after fifteen or twenty more seconds of tiring defensive effort.

Conversely, as a team that’s not nearly as explosive as Oregon on the offensive side of the ball ( the Rams are just 118th in offensive efficiency), generating more second looks of their own than usual could mean the difference for the Rams. Obviously, this would become especially true if they find themselves playing from behind, a situation they are very likely to encounter.

Overall, the Rams’ ability to pull down offensive boards is about equal to the Ducks’ ability to prevent them, and vice versa the Ducks have the clear advantage. If the Rams can flip that script, which is extremely possible against a team that, as mentioned, doesn’t have any physically dominant bigs, that would drastically improve their chances of winning the ballgame.