Georgia-Auburn basketball: Time, TV, how to watch online (February 10, 2018)

Yante Maten (L) and Georgia coach Mark Fox are trying to figure out how to get the Bulldogs back on the winning track after dropping five of their last six games.

(FILE PHOTO/UGA)

Posted 10 months ago

Georgia men’s basketball will play Auburn on Saturday, February 10, 2018. Find below the game time, TV channel and how to watch online.

ATHENS — Half-full or half-empty. The Georgia Bulldogs have to decide which way they want to look back at their last game against Auburn.

Either way, it was a loss. The Bulldogs fell 79-65 at Auburn on Jan. 20. But as they prepare to face the Tigers again Saturday at Stegeman Coliseum, can choose to focus on what they did well in building a 16-point, first-half lead; or what they did poorly, in blowing all of that and then some as Auburn executed a 30-point turnaround.

The fact is, Georgia isn’t doing very much well at all at the moment. The Bulldogs have dropped seven of their last nine games, with their latest defeat coming 81-66 at the hands of a what was supposed to below-standard Vanderbilt team. The Commodores buried the Bulldogs beneath a barrage of 11 3-point baskets.

“Our defense essentially disappeared,” coach Mark Fox said Friday. “We’ve got to get back to defending. In the last two games we have not defended nearly to the level we need to.”

Georgia needs to score a little, too. The Bulldogs reached 70 points just three times since the calendar flipped to 2018, and one of those games was a double-overtime loss to Arkansas.

Opponents are clamping down hard defensively on All-SEC forward Yante Maten and daring somebody else to score from the outside. Only in the 72-60 win over Florida in their last game at home in Stegeman Coliseum have the Bulldogs been able to do that in the last four weeks.

In the meantime, the heat is getting cranked up on both the team and its coach. There were high expectations this season for the Bulldogs, who were expected to at least qualify for the NCAA tournament if not contend for the SEC title.

Neither objective seems in play at the moment.

“It’s not where we want it to be, and that’s something that I’ve realized,” said Maten, who is averaging 19.3 points and 8.8 rebounds per game, both among the leaders in the league. “But at the end of the day you can only control what you can control, and we’re trying to control effort and our defense, and try our best to get a good shot that we practice every day and make.”

Georgia will again be shorthanded as it enters a very challenging stretch to end the regular season. Sophomore guard Jordan Harris remains indefinitely suspended for undisclosed reasons.

Meanwhile, they have to figure out how to slow down an offensive juggernaut in No. 8 Auburn, which had won five straight before dropping an 81-80 decision to Texas A&M on Wednesday.

“We’ve been going back to work, and going back to work hard,” Fox said. “We had a good practice Thursday and hopefully will again (Friday).”