STARKVILLE – Mississippi State men’s basketball’s season is over without an NCAA Tournament bid for the first time under head coach Chris Jans.

Year 4 under Jans was always going to be a year of change for the Bulldogs, but the losses of Cameron Matthews to the NBA and KeShawn Murphy to the transfer portal proved too much to handle for a team that had to balance several upperclassmen newcomers with a group of freshmen and sophomores new to Division I basketball.

The result was a 13-19 record, 5-13 in SEC play, and the program’s worst showing since 2014-15.

“There’s a lot that goes on in any college basketball program,” Jans said on Wednesday after a loss to Auburn in the SEC Tournament. “You start the first week of June and end somewhere in March. It’s a long season, and we struggled out the gate. That’s been our secret sauce since we’ve been here, in my opinion, we’ve had really good non-conference schedules and results going into the SEC that have put us in a position to have the metrics and the record and everything that’s required to get in the NCAA Tournament. We knew it was going to be an uphill battle internally as a coaching staff.”

Slow start repeated

After two wins in SEC play, the Bulldogs lost eight of their next nine games. A pair of wins over Ole Miss and Auburn, paired with resurgent scoring performances from Josh Hubbard, provided some respite before losing the next five to end the regular season.

During that time, Jans looked to the nonconference struggles that plagued the team and led to backbreaking losses.

“I would say we’re not in the spot where we thought we would be, period, not just in the SEC but overall,” Jans said in the midst of MSU’s SEC January-February slump. “We didn’t have a stellar non-conference portion of our season. It paled in comparison to the prior three years in number of wins. Then, even more importantly, the number of quality wins for a potential resume.”

The Bulldogs picked up early losses to Iowa State, now considered a national-title contender, as well as Kansas State and New Mexico in neutral-site games. The Wildcats have struggled since then and are in search of a new head coach while the Lobos have had a strong campaign as a mid-major power.

The real blow seemingly came with a home loss to SMU on Black Friday and a loss in Tupelo against San Francisco, but the Bulldogs rallied with a big road comeback against Utah to kickstart a six-game winning streak.

The resilience was there, but the basketball part just wasn’t coming together.

“We started off 2-0 (in the SEC) with the big wins out the gate at Texas and Oklahoma. Then, we couldn’t sustain it. We just couldn’t sustain it. We had a hard time for different reasons and for different reasons throughout the season. Obviously, we’re disappointed in the results. It’s not what anybody from the coaching staff, myself, the administration, the fanbase and the people that love Bulldog basketball had in store. That’s where the season ended.”

By the numbers

The standout issue for the Bulldogs was on defense, where MSU ranked 343rd in scoring defense with opponents averaging 81.81 points per game against MSU’s average of 77.62 points per game scored, which ranked 122nd nationally.

The Bulldogs also had Hubbard, a Top-10 scorer for most of the year with 22 points per game and three of his highest-scoring performances in maroon and white. Guard Jayden Epps offered a complementary scoring-guard role to Hubbard with 13.7 points per game, while Ja’Borri McGhee proved more than useful in a sixth-man role.

Where the Bulldogs missed in the transfer portal was down low.

MSU had just two healthy bigs going into the season, senior Quincy Ballard and true freshman Jamarion Davis-Fleming. It was a process to get the latter up to speed, but he needed to play big minutes as a freshman to support the former. Forwards Achor Achor and Sergej Macura offered some more size down low, but always looked more like a work in progress in the frontcourt rather than an immediate solution.

As a result, more and more of the scoring burden fell on Hubbard and Epps. When they struggled, the team had no chance, and in the end it was clear how much the offensive flow outside of the backcourt failed to lift the team. The Bulldogs were 252nd in assist/turnover ratio and 199th in effective field goal percentage, which is adjusted for the value of three-pointers.

Square one

The Bulldogs are now back where they were after losing to Baylor in the first round of the NCAA Tournament a year ago. There is a big roster evaluation ahead with six seniors graduating, and Hubbard is once again weighing his options after entering the NBA Draft process last year.

Then there is the transfer portal, which opens on April 7.

Jans has said this season that for some time now the team’s plans have been impacted by how they can build around Josh, and that will be the same should he return.

“Since the end of his freshman year, who we pair him with in the backcourt and what kind of style we play is directly affected by having Josh returning in that way,” he said after a win over Ole Miss last month.

“It’s not about building a program anymore,” he said. “People didn’t necessarily love that I said that in my first press conference, but it was unfortunately the truth of where it was at, where it was going. When I said that then, I say it now, it has nothing to do with culture and standards and expectations, and how you run your program, how kids are the biggest deal inside the program, who you bring in… When you get to that point, who is coming back is certainly the most important decision-slash-questions people will have.”