College Park, Md. » If you want to know why the rebound disparity was so glaring in Utah's 71-56 loss to Maryland on Tuesday night, all you need to do is check with Elaine Elliott and listen to the choices she had to make.
With a bigger lineup, the Utes had only two players, Kalee Whipple and Morgan Warburton , who could make a shot from the perimeter. With five shooters on the floor, there was no size, or length on the boards.
So Elliott was forced to pick her poison. She went with the bigger lineup in the first half, but that yielded just 28 points, and we all know that Maryland finished the first 20 minutes 16 points ahead.
The shooting lineup was a little better, but then the Terrapins were playing volleyball with themselves on the glass.
"It was really tough when three of the five players didn't have to be guarded," Elliott said.
"When you have players on the floor that didn't have to be defended, there was no place to go because everyone was sagging inside the paint. We were limited to shooting three-pointers."
Home advantage
In praising Maryland, Elliott was quick to shoot down the notion that the Terrapins benefitted from playing on their home floor at the Comcast Center.
Of course, Maryland hasn't lost at home in two years. But Elliott pointed out during the postgame news conference that Tuesday's result would've happened pretty much anywhere.
"It came down to a difference in physicality," Elliott said. "A neutral court wouldn't have changed that. We prefer that this wasn't a home game, but the differences in this game were apparent that we couldn't overcome wherever we played."
Odds and ends
Tuesday's crowd of 10,065 at the Comcast Center was announced as the largest of any first or second round site. ... Utah's Sasha McKinnon was called for a second-half technical foul for throwing an elbow at Marissa Coleman .
