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‘Block out the noise’: Shockers seeking answers following worst home start since 1996

The Wichita State men’s basketball program isn’t accustomed to losing much in recent history, especially in a season that began with so much promise.

The fans are frustrated, the players are frustrated and the coaches with the tension between the fan base and the team growing even more following Wichita State’s 61-57 loss to Cincinnati on Sunday at Koch Arena.

Wichita State continued its downward spiral of the last seven weeks, dropping to 0-4 in American Athletic Conference play and losing its sixth straight game against a top-150 opponent. It was also the fifth loss for WSU (9-7) at home, the most at home in a season for WSU since the 2007-08 season and the earliest a fifth loss at home has occurred since the 1995-96 season.

“It’s a storm,” WSU star Tyson Etienne summarized after the game. “It’s kind of like a sick movie, but I’m not going to give up. I don’t think anybody on the team is going to give up.”

Not only is WSU losing more frequently at home, the team is blowing double-digit leads at home — something that happened even more rarely at Koch Arena. In four of five home losses, WSU has led by at least 10 points.

Coming up short down the stretch has begun to take its toll on the team.

“Losing bothers me, period,” WSU coach Isaac Brown said. “I ain’t going to be able to sleep at no point tonight. I’m trying to figure out in my mind what I could have done differently in every game, who I need to get the ball to late and what can I do to light a fire in these guys.

“We can’t accept losing around here.”

Since a promising 6-1 start to the season, punctuated by road wins at Missouri and Oklahoma State, WSU has been mired in a slump that has lasted more than six weeks now.

For a team that won so many close games down the stretch en route to its surprise AAC championship last season, WSU has failed to recreate that same magic this season. For the second straight home loss, WSU’s offense sputtered down the stretch — producing just two points on the final six possessions of the game in the final four minutes.

Now the goal of repeating as AAC champions and returning to the NCAA Tournament have been replaced with the simple goal of playing well enough down the stretch to close out a game. The Shockers will try for their first AAC win on Wednesday at Temple, a place where they’ve never won in the AAC era.

“We just have to weather the storm,” Etienne said. “You set out out on a big goal and big intentions to do certain things, but you’re not always in control of how everything comes out. That doesn’t mean when stuff goes bad, you say, ‘I don’t wanna go after that goal anymore.’ You’ve got to see it through to completion because you never know what could happen.

“We’ve got 13 more conference games. We could end up going 13-4 and people look back at the end of March and say, ‘Man, they went 13-4, that’s a great conference record.’”

“And everybody that hopped off will hop back on,” WSU junior Dexter Dennis added.

In the age of social media, it’s easier than ever for fans to voice their displeasure with how things are going with Wichita State basketball. The players read the messages from fans and comments questioning Brown as their coach, but Dennis said the key for the team to push through its funk will be to “block out the noise.”

“People here are used to winning and I”m not mad at them. I’m not mad at nobody,” Dennis said. “But just block it out. And learn from it. My freshman year, we started out 1-6 but then we turned it around. Eventually, things are going to start working for us. We’ve just got to keep coming to work, blocking out the outside noise and drawing strength from one another.”

Brown continues to stress that Wichita State has been able to avoid any “negative energy” within its own team, even with negativity building up outside of the program.

There were plenty of things WSU could point to from the Cincinnati game that explained how the team came up short down the stretch: a handful of misses from point-blank range, failing to string together stops and an open miss on a game-tying three-pointer in the final seconds.

As the veteran leaders on the team, Etienne, Dennis and Morris Udeze continue to try to push this team through its slump.

“One thing we can do is stay positive,” Dennis said. “Our season is not over yet. It hurts to take a lot of losses, this many in a row, but at the end of the day, we can still turn it around.”