It wasn’t pretty, but the Tigers overcame a really, really bad first half to win by a fairly comfortable 17-point margin.

John Calipari said Memphis wasn’t ready to play, and I’ll accept that as a valid explanation for the first half, which ended in a 21-21 tie.

In reality, it shouldn’t have ever come to that. Memphis should have won by 40. I’ll try to be nice here, but East Carolina is, ahem, very deserving of its No. 323 RPI ranking. With the number of times East Carolina flat-out gave the ball to Memphis on turnovers, and the fact East Carolina airballed more outside shots than they made, it’s remarkable that this was ever a game.

Having said that, I don’t think this game was a step back or a reason for concern or anything like that. If you buy Calipari’s explanation that players were joking around 25 minutes before tipoff, then the Tigers thought they could win this game without really trying, and they were basically correct.

The biggest downside to this game is that Memphis had to use its top five players way, way more than it should have. Just consider, Robert Dozier played 34 minutes, Joey Dorsey played 30, Antonio Anderson played 36, Jeremy Hunt played 30 and Andre Allen played 32.

You don’t get many opportunities in conference games to really go deep into your bench, and this should have been a spot for guys like Tre’Von Willis and Pierre Niles to play 12-15 minutes and get some road experience. Even Willie Kemp could have used a confidence-builder, and instead he played just 12 minutes and really struggled.