Jan. 31, 2005

Charrleston, SC - Monday Night Basketball has been a big hit this season at The Citadel. The past two weekends, the Bulldogs have rebounded from Saturday disappointments to win on Monday.

If they are to avoid their first losing skid of the season, the Bulldogs will have to win tonight for the fourth Monday in a row. Coming off an 81-59 blowout loss at Davidson on Saturday, The Citadel faces a much different Wofford team than the one it beat on Jan. 17 in Spartanburg.

That victory followed a 24-point Saturday loss at Furman. The next weekend, The Citadel fell at home to UNC Greensboro on Saturday before going on the road to win at East Tennessee State for the first time since 1997 on Monday.

But Citadel coach Pat Dennis is wary of saying "Thank God it's Monday" for several reasons:

-- Despite a six-game losing skid, Wofford (8-10, 1-6 in the Southern Conference) is a different team than the one that gave up a 21-point lead to The Citadel two weeks ago. Junior forward Howard Wilkerson injured his knee in that game and is lost for the season. Since then, Terriers coach Mike Young has worked hard at remaking his team, and a 79-76 loss at Georgia Southern on Jan. 24 showed promising results. Where the Terriers ran most of their offense through Wilkerson before, now they are spreading the floor and trying to create space for a bevy of good shooters. Against Georgia Southern, the three starting guards totaled 39 points. Guard Greg Taylor, a 6-5 senior, got minutes at power forward and scored 12 points with eight rebounds, and freshman guard Drew Gibson had 11 points off the bench.

"We've got to reinvent ourselves offensively," Young said last week. "I don't know how else to say it. In a couple of days, we've had to become a completely different team offensively. To the credit of our guys, they are really close to locking in on it."

-- Even though The Citadel already has beaten Wofford, that 76-74 win took something of a miracle. Freshman guard Travis Smith hit seven 3-pointers and scored 25 points, all in the second half. Smith is 1 of 7 from 3-point range in the three games since then.

-- The status of Citadel sophomore Joseph Thompson for today's game was uncertain Sunday, though it appears he will be able to play. Thompson, a 6-5 forward who scored nine points against Davidson, was ejected for throwing an elbow with 5:15 left in Saturday's game (it also was his fifth foul). But he was not assessed with a technical foul, and apparently there was no mention of the incident on the officials' game report.

"When we lost at Furman, at least there were times when we played pretty well," Dennis said after the Davidson game. "This time, I thought we had very few minutes of good basketball. So that makes me very concerned about this game."