Jags Season Ends With 84-73 Loss To Tulane In CollegeInsider.com Tournament
The South Alabama Jaguars men’s basketball team had their season end Wednesday night as they fell 84-73 in New Orleans to the Tulane Green Wave.
Over the final five minutes of the game Tulane used a 9-0 run to clinch the win over the Jags in the first round of the CollegeInsider.com Tournament. The Jags end the season with a 17-13 overall record while the Green Wave improve to 20-14 and advance in the tournament.
The difference in the game was from the free throw line as Tulane went 27-of-37 from the charity stripe.
Junior Augustine Rubit was the games top scorer with 31 points with 25 of them coming after halftime including 15 consecutive late in the game. He was 12-of-18 shooting from the floor and 7-of-8 from the free throw line.
Sophomore Mychal Ammons scored 11 points while Javier Carter just missed a double-double with nine points and a team-high 10 rebounds. Freddie Goldstein would add four points in his final game of his career at USA and his first returning from a broken collarbone.
Josh Davis of Tulane earned his 19th double-double of the season with 26 points and 12 rebounds. Kendall Timmons and Ricky Tarrant both added 13 points each.
The Jags trailed all of the final 38:55 of the game but would not allow themselves to be put away. Barrington Stevens III would pull the Jags within two points with 12:37 left but that would be as close as they could get, the closest they would get the rest of the way out would be four points.
“I thought our guys fought extremely hard in some tough situations,” interim head coach Jeff Price said after the game. “It was hard to get a flow of the game. Because of the free throws, you couldn’t get a rhythm or a flow going. We got in to foul trouble, particularly with Aug in the first half. I thought our guys were resilient like they always have been, it just caught up with us in the end.”
“It was another unbelievable effort by him [Augustine Rubit],” Price said. “Again, those numbers came with him being double and triple teamed. He did a nice job kicking it out and just played extremely well.”
“I’m proud of our guys,” said Price. “They’ve been tremendous all year. They like each other, they play hard and they play together. As a coach, that’s all you can ask for.”
Now the focus will turn towards the coaching search, which Jeff Price is a candidate for, to see who will be the next men’s head basketball coach at South Alabama.