Saturday's Sports Update: Men's basketball drops final season game to Tulsa
It was senior night at Tudor Fieldhouse this afternoon as men's basketball fell to the University of Tulsa 60-50. Junior Cory Pflieger was the only Owl to hit double figures with ten points. Tulsa's Jerome Jordan scored a game-high 15, one of three visiting players to score more than ten.
The two squads came in carrying mirroring records with the Golden Hurricanes (21-9, 11-4 C-USA) sitting in second place in Conference USA and the Owls (9-20, 4-11 C-USA) in second to last.
But the Owls did not let the standings dictate the pace of the game. At the end of the first half, they led by a single point, 25-24. The first half was a defensive struggle between the two teams, and though Rice led for most of it, no team had more than a three-point lead at any time.
Freshman forward Emerson Herndon and sophomore Trey Stanton led both sides in the first half with seven points.
However, In keeping with a recurring theme throughout conference play, the Owls lost their lead early in the second after a 12-1 Tulsa run made it 36-26 after five minutes of play. Rice did not score a field goal in the half until freshman Connor Frizzelle made a long jumper to end the Hurricane's run.
"We always come up in the first half," senior center Aleks Perka said. "And then let down in the second half early. We haven't learned that yet. We have to focus in the first couple of minutes."
The big second half for the visitors was in large part due to a surge from Jordan. After double teams held him to only two points in the first, the 7-foot center adjusted and repeatedly spun out of the double team for an easy bucket.
Though the Owls shot 28 percent in the second half, they brought the game back to within two with eight minutes left after a turnaround jumper from Pflieger made it 43-41. However, Tulsa slowly pushed forward from there and never allowed the home team to gain momentum.
"I thought we had some open looks and we didn't knock them down," head coach Ben Braun said. "They didn't fall. If we knock down four more shots, we are up. It is unfortunately because we did have some open looks, and we didn't shoot the ball as well as we normally do."
The match up was the final home game for seniors Rodney Foster, Zac Coffelt, and Perka.
The squad will rest all day Sunday. The next day, they will start preparing for the C-USA Tournament which begins on Wednesday in Memphis, Tenn. Rice's opponent is not yet known.
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