For a St. Joe’s team with A-10 title aspirations, blowout loss to Utah felt more like a speed bump than a wake-up call

The final score read like a blowout, and for large chunks of Thursday night’s game at Hagan Arena, it was exactly that.

The host St. Joseph’s Hawks entered undefeated at 8-0. It was an ideal start to a season, obviously, but they weren’t going to win them all. And if you were looking at the schedule to see when the first loss might come, you had to be circling Thursday, when 11th-ranked Utah, the nation’s scoring leader, came to Hawk Hill.

It ended with the visitors celebrating a 74-48 victory, a trip to Connecticut to face No. 1 South Carolina up next on Sunday. Call it a tune-up for the Utes, but don’t call it a wake-up call for St. Joe’s, picked second in the preseason Atlantic 10 poll. It felt more like a speed bump because there were plenty of positives to take away from it.

“Today was really good for us,” St. Joe’s coach Cindy Griffin said, noting that you can only tell a group so much about what to expect playing against a nationally ranked team. “Until they experience it, until they sense it, taste it, feel it, compete against it, they won’t know. I think this is really good for us because we needed to experience this if we want to be there in March.”

It was a 17-2 Utah start that doomed St. Joe’s. Too much standing around, Griffin said, in the early going. The Hawks showed plenty of fight, however. What was a 21-point Utah lead shrunk to six when junior forward Talya Brugler scored two of her team-best 16 points. But Utah never let it get closer. Alissa Pili, who entered Thursday 10th in the nation in points per game (22.2), went on a personal 12-0 run in the fourth quarter to put the game away. She finished with 31 points on 12-for-17 shooting.

Griffin was proud of the fight in the second and third quarters but lamented the Hawks’ 17 turnovers, which led to 21 Utah points at the other end. Cut those in half, Griffin said, and St. Joe’s would’ve had more of a chance.

“We made some key mistakes defensively that I thought really hurt us,” Griffin said. “A team like that can really penalize you.

“We had our opportunities. We got shots, they just didn’t go in.”

St. Joe’s missed 15 of its first 18 shots from the floor and finished the game making just 32.2% of its attempts.

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On the list of positives: Utah entered making 14 three-pointers per game and made just eight against the Hawks. Five of those came during a first quarter that ended with Utah leading, 22-6. The Utes, playing without injured guard Gianna Kneepkens (17.8 points per game), entered the game scoring 99 points per game, more than four points clear of the next team (Murray State) on the list. St. Joe’s held them to a season-low 74 points.

“They run good stuff. They play with good tempo,” Utah coach Lynne Roberts said. “They just execute well, and you can just tell they’re well-coached. They seem tough.”

That assessment was what Roberts said she had seen on film. There was plenty of good St. Joe’s film to watch ahead of Thursday night. The Hawks’ 8-0 start didn’t come by accident.

They opened the season with a 22-point win over Rider, followed it with a 21-point win over Yale, then scorched Penn, 77-49, before beating Drexel by 11 to make it four consecutive double-digit wins to start the year. A two-point overtime win over Temple was the Hawks’ only single-digit win entering Thursday. They are balanced — four players average double figures in points — and experienced. And Thursday night was just their third home game in their first nine games.

Up next is home game No. 4, and it’s a big one: Villanova at 7 p.m. Saturday. It is effectively the Big 5 championship game, both teams now 2-0 vs. Big 5 foes after the Wildcats beat Penn on Tuesday night.

The quick turnaround, Griffin said, wasn’t a bad thing.

“Sometimes that’s better,” she said. “Get back on the horse and start riding.”

It’s been that kind of week for St. Joe’s. The Hawks hosted and beat North Florida Saturday. They then shipped up to Boston and beat Boston University, 62-47. Saturday will mark four games in eight days.

A tough stretch, sure, but Griffin put it in the right perspective.

“It’s not ideal, but here’s the thing: If we’re going to win a championship, you’ve got to win three or four games in a row,” she said. “You don’t even have a day to prepare; you’ve got to be ready to go. To me, I’m looking at it like we’re getting ready for our conference tournament and we’re going to have to play back to back to back. We’ve got to be prepared for that.”