Tigers set to take on Knights

The Tigers and the Knights meet for a third time on Friday afternoon in the AAC quarterfinals, after Memphis defeated the Tulane Green Wave 83-68 in the first round of the AAC Tournament.

Memphis and UCF have met twice this season with the two teams splitting the two meetings. Memphis did have the bigger win out of the split when the Tigers shut down the Knights 77-57 on January, 25that the FedEx Forum. UCF won the second matchup in Orlando 79-72 as the Tigers were able to hang around for a majority of the game.

Head Coach Penny Hardaway had this to say about the game with UCF:

“Yeah, we felt like, you know, in both games, we had a good game plan, so we feel like they will make adjustments on what we did to them to affect them. Here, we had a really good game and beat them by 20. Down there it went to the wire. They have a really good team. They might be the hottest team in our league right now, the way they finished this season and put themselves in the top 25.

The challenges are going to be that this is the third time. The things that we were successful at, they’ve had a chance to work on them. Because out of us and Tulane, they probably figure Memphis will win that game, so they’ve had a lot of time to prepare. And they watched us today, so they’re going to make some more minor adjustments. We will have to be hitting on all cylinders tomorrow.”

With the win over Tulane on Thursday, the Tigers have crossed the 20 win mark on the season improving to 20-12 on the season. The game with UCF will be an all-out war when the two meet for the third time this season.

Memphis will need to have Jeremiah get his usual 20 plus points, but will also Kyvon Davenport have another game like, he had on Thursday in the win over Tulane. Davenport had 17 points, went 6-13 from the field, and 3-6 from behind the arc. If the Tigers can get similar numbers out of Davenport on Friday the Tigers will likely be in good shape.

This game between Memphis and UCF is bound to be an instant classic that could go down in Tiger basketball history. It will be a battle, but the Tigers have only lost two games this season when playing at Memphis.

The Tigers and Knights will tip-off around 1:00 on ESPN2. The winner of the game will play the winner of Houston and UCONN in the semifinals on Saturday afternoon.