by Matt Harrington

PALO ALTO–The 79-59 loss to the Utah Utes (19-4) Thursday in Utah was a game that the Stanford Cardinal (16-8) had on the schedule they knew that that game was going to be a struggle. Utah is 10th in the nation. There a top ten team and their a force come March come April. The Utes are going to be a three seed or a four seed.

Utah is a force, the thing that was evident following that game was they had the blue print to beat Stanford, they knew exactly what to do. The Utes eliminated Chasson Randle so he’s not going out for 20 points and they stopped him from scoring in the final six minutes of the game which is just crazy to think about.

Your talking about shutting down the guy who could very well be the Pac 12 player of the year. The Utes also got the Cardinal’s Stefan Nastic out of the game pretty early with foul trouble. When you force Stanford to their depths they’ll struggle a little bit they don’t have the scoring depth that Utah has or the scoring depth that Arizona or UCLA has.

The Cardinal don’t have that guy off the bench like other teams they don’t have a ASU player like Jordan Bachynski or a couple guys like that from UCLA that can come off the bench and put up ten or 12. So that was what was really going on in that game on Thursday was Utah they used the right strings to pull and they pulled it to beat the Cardinal and big too.

When you look at the Big Three for Stanford your looking at Randle, Nastic, and your looking at Anthony Brown. When you see what their total contribution was in that game you look at Randle’s ten points, Nastic’s seven, and Brown led the team with 15. Brown was the only one who was able to stay on the court and be productive with 15 points in that game.

It was Utah following the blue print getting Nastic out with with foul trouble and he’s prone to get into foul trouble. The Utes were contesting Randle and keeping him off the boards and keeping him from distributing the ball. Randle only had three assists and three turnovers and that is what the Utes applied high pressure on Randle in order for him to turn the ball over.

Matt Harrington covers Stanford basketball for http://www.sportsradioservice.com listen to Matt’s podcast on Stanford below