Second Half Shooting Woes Down Jaguars Against Tennessee State
A shooting drought in the second half allowed Tennessee State to pull away from South Alabama on Monday in Atlanta. The Jags went over nine minutes without a field goal late in the second half as Tennessee State pulled away for a 68-57 win Monday night in the Coaches versus Cancer Classic at the Georgia State Sports Arena.
South Alabama falls to 2-1 on the young season while TSU get their first win to improve to 1-3 on the season.
“It was an absolute, total let-down in the first half,” Jags head coach Ronnie Arrow said. “I hate to say it, but we played selfishly. As good as we have been playing, we took too many bad shots. I don’t even have to look at the stats to see we took bad shots. We didn’t work the ball around.”
TSU did not waste any time getting started as they scored within three seconds of winning the opening tip. They then jumped out to a 13-2 lead on the Jags as they missed their first three shots and committed three turnovers before making their first shot of the game.
At halftime the TSU Tigers had a 36-24 lead.
But the Jags would start the second half strong by scoring the first nine points of the half to get within three points of the Tigers 36-33. Augustine Rubit accounted for eight of those nine points in less that three minutes of play.
However, three points were as close as the Jags would get. Xavier Roberson would hit a jumper with 15:07 left in the game to cut the lead back to 38-35, but TSU would score the next four points to extend their lead back to seven points. The two schools would trade scores over the next few minutes before a 7-0 run by TSU to further extend their lead to 51-39.
Then a layup from Rubit at the 10:24 mark would pull the Jags within 51-43, but the team would go stone cold. The Jags would miss their next six shots with three turnovers and would go only 4-of-9 from the free throw line during that span. The Tigers would pounce on the shooting woes to go on a 17-4 run to open up a 68-47 lead.
“We played with energy,” Arrow said of the comeback early in the second half. “We gave ourselves a chance—we made the extra pass and got layups.”
“We didn’t run our offense,” Arrow continued. “We couldn’t run our offense because we were shooting the ball. We had horrible decision making with the ball.”
“They kicked our tail on the boards. We had seven offensive rebounds. They took us to the ‘shed on the boards. We’re not rebounding like we did year. We have to do something about that. This team should be a very good rebounding team.”
Augustine Rubit would lead all players with 21 points, 19 of them in the second half. He shot 7-of-10 from the floor and was a perfect 7-for-7 from the free throw line. “We weren’t getting him the ball (in the first half) and he wasn’t moving around much to get the ball. He started out slow. In the second half he got some more movement.”
Mychal Ammons would be the only other Jaguar to score double digit points with 11 and would lead all Jaguars with seven rebounds.
South Alabama will have to rebound quickly as they face Monmouth on Tuesday at 3pm Central time. The game can be heard on 105.5-FM WSNP and http://www.wnsp.com/.