STARKVILLE – There was little doubt about the result when Chandler Bing (the Vanderbilt men’s basketball player, not the character from Friends) hit a three-pointer at the halftime buzzer, giving his team a 51-30 lead at the interval against Mississippi State.
The contest had felt decided since the opening minutes, during which the Commodores jumped out to a 22-4 lead and mounted two different 10-point runs. The contest felt decided when the Bulldogs had conceded another three-pointer just a minute before the buzzer. The situation was such that the officials didn’t even bother realize the ball was still in Bing’s hands when the buzzer sounded.
“It wasn’t an ideal ending, not that it was going to change that lopsided of a game, but the lead official apologized to me when we came out and said they’d missed it,” MSU head coach Chris Jans said after the game. “It was clearly in his hands, which we griped about, but it doesn’t matter. We should have got the rebound.”
It was a play that, as Jans pointed out, meant very little in terms of the lopsided 88-56 scoreline at the end of the game, but one which seemed to capture the contest in a bottle. Everything seemingly went against MSU on the play, but above all the team just didn’t deliver in the moment that they had to.
The Bulldogs (10-10, 2-5 SEC) are in the midst of a five-game losing skid after the blowout defeat to No. 15 Vanderbilt at Humphrey Coliseum on Saturday.
“It surprised me,” Jans said. “Both teams were on the wrong side of a streak, and talked a lot about that in the last 48 hours, and that one team is going to feel better after today… They brought great intensity to the start of the game. I don’t know if our guys thought we’d get off to a good start, because that’s kinda been the norm in SEC play and even prior for a few games. Didn’t have the right mental approach or certainly the physicality, intensity, attention to detail that we know we have to play with all the time, but especially out the gate.”
The effort was start and stop at times, but for the most part, the Bulldogs appeared shellshocked against a prolific Commodores team. What Jans pointed to specifically on the effort side was that Jamarion Davis-Flemming’s two offensive rebounds were the only boards on the offensive glass in the second half for the Bulldogs.
“That can’t happen when you’re trying to get back in a game,” Jans said. “You’ve got to have more guys hungry for the ball. I’m not doing a good enough job to get them to play with that motor that’s required to do all the things that we want them to do.”
The effort to finish the game was as lacking as the effort to start the game, and that’s something that the leaders in the locker room pointed to afterward.
“They started off hot, had a good gameplan against us, defensively and offensively,” Josh Hubbard said after the defeat. MSU’s leading scorer on the season had another poor night shooting the ball, finishing with just seven points on 2-10 shooting.
“We kind of talked about like a fight when we go into games, first round, and they kind of got us bloody a bit. They went on a run and after that we were just trying to crawl out of the hole.”
“We tried to lift each other up, try to give each other some energy, some enthusiasm,” Senior guard Jayden Epps said of the team during the game. “At the end of the day that’s what we’ve got to do when we get down. Like Hubb said, we’ve got to learn how to find a way to get back up. We’re just going to keep fighting. We’ll be down again this year, and we’ll have to fight back. That’s something we have to be better at and we’re going to keep working at.”
Epps finished with a team-high 14 points, the only Bulldog in double figures on the day. Like Hubbard, his scoring numbers have taken a hit recently after a fast start to the new year, and he’s a player that the team is counting on to help shoot their way out of a bad situation.
With 11 games to play, the bad vibes from early in the season are front and center again for a Bulldog group that has hit a new low with a 32-point loss. The deficit is tied for the third-worst defeat in four years under Jans.
“We’re going to find out,” Jans said when asked about improving and relying on player leadership. “We’re pretty deep into a tough, wrong side of the street, and we’re going to need a lot of that right now. From players, from myself, it starts there, ends there. Our staff… We’ve got to go on the road now this week, I don’t care who you’re playing, where you’re playing, home, road, neutral… in this league, you’re gonna play a prepared team with really good players and a plan. Point is well taken, and we have to figure out a way to stay together, coach better, compete more.”
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