Sorry, but that's not how it works in my experience. What do we always hear when a team can't get to the basket or get any scoring in the lane? 'They need to hit some outside shots to spread the defense out and create more space to work'. They were blistering hot, and we had to come out and close the space on much better athletes. As a player the one thing you figure out really early in a game is 'who is the king, and who is the queen'. If a guy is much quicker or much stronger, he's the king. Nothing wrong with being the queen, but you have to accept you are the queen and adjust your game accordingly, specifically, you need to play off a little in order not to get beaten. It's especially true if you are on the perimeter. If a guy beats you out there, he has space to work, either to get to the basket, or to create an opportunity for a teammate when the help defense comes to him. It also creates more space for teams to attack rebounds. It's not just bigs who rebound better when a team can't pack in the lane, but wings have a ton more room to crash the boards, and guards tend to stink at blocking out.
As many have said, we are not gifted athletically. We needed the game to go a particular way to be competitive and get a win. It went a completely opposite direction from what we were hoping, and there is no adjustment Fred or anyone else could do. Maybe if we had a couple of the guys available that are hurt or suspended, maybe a healthy Keita would have made it harder for guys to get to the basket, or another guard to help pump up our perimeter defense, but we didn't have those options. They had 16 second chance points, we had 9, so that did gain them 8 points, but we had 17 fast break points to their 9, so that's basically a wash. They killed us in bench scoring because Carter and Coleman went for 23 to our 8. No matter how you want to point to other areas, our demise was absolutely caused by their shooting 56.5% from the arc.
Without a doubt NU doesn't have the athlete's A&M does, nor do we have the quickness, so in that situation, you do what you can in terms of limiting them, which would be, contest the 3 point shot. With that, it was also clear we could not run man with A&M, so you have to try a zone defense.. that would for sure help to limit those dribble drives.
In the end, yeah, we have a long ways to go before we are at that level!