Men’s basketball defeats Cougars
The USU men’s basketball season opener lived up to its hype.
Senior guard Brockieth Pane, who scored in double figures for the 23rd time in his career, led a second-half surge in front of a sold-out Dee Glen Smith Spectrum. BYU lead several times during the second half, but an 11-0 run from USU put the game out of reach.
Head coach Stew Morrill is now 194-13 inside the Spectrum and BYU has not defeated USU inside the building since 2000. USU has won 13 of its last 14 home openers and 44 of its last 47 regular season games.
Brady Jardine had 12 points in the winning effort.
A raucous student body brought deafening levels of noise, and Brockeith Pane had a high-energy second half, scoring 17 points to lead the Aggies over the BYU Cougars 69-62 on Friday night at the Dee Glen Smith Spectrum.
“That was an awfully good win for an inexperience team,” USU head coach Stew Morrill said. “We just kind of battled.”
Neither team came into the game as a heavy favorite in the early season matchup, and the first half played out evenly. Neither team held a lead greater than four points, while both teams shot high percentages from the floor.
BYU shot 50 percent from the field in the first half, while struggling to hit the from the 3-point line. In fact, the Cougars hit 25 percent from 3-point range, and that percentage did not improve as the game progressed.
USU shot 47 percent in the first half from the field and 40 percent from the 3-point line. Forward Mitch Bruneel led the Aggies, with eight points in the second half.
“We would have been in trouble if Mitch hadn’t hit a few shots,” Morrill said.
The sophomore from Boise, Idaho, hit two key 3-pointers in the first half. The first gave USU a 14-13 lead midway through the first half, after BYU’s Stephen Rogers made an easy layup to give the Cougars a slim two-point lead.
Bruneel hit again less than two minutes later to give USU its biggest lead of the half, at 19-15.
“It was a team effort,” Pane said. “We just came out ready to play. We came out aggressive hungry and ready to play.”
During a post-game interview, after the Aggies defeated Adams State, senior forward Brady Jardine said both teams would make runs, and USU would need to respond to any run by BYU to win the game.
“They came out and made a run on us, and we just stayed composed, and we just stayed ready to play,” Pane said.
BYU began the second half with a 5-0 run, propelled by a pair of jumpers from senior forward Noah Hartsock, who finished the game with a team-high 18 points, and a free throw from junior forward Brandon Davies.
The game included 10 ties and nine lead changes, but BYU held the lead often through the first nine minutes of the second half.
A pair of free throws from Davies, with just over 11 minutes remaining, put BYU up by four — the largest lead to that point — before USU went on an 11-0 run to regain a lead it would never relinquish.
“We always get better in the second half,” Jardine said. “We always seem to find that extra boost. I don’t know if it’s from the fans, if it’s from the atmosphere or from digging down deep, but we had a stretch in the second half where we had good defense, and we started to hit our shots.”
The Aggies struggled to figure out BYU’s zone defense to begin the second half, but a quick move to the hoop by freshman Steven Thorton broke the zone and propelled an 11-0 run.
“He’s quick, and he just went by them,” Morrill said of Thorton. “After that, it kind of got us to start driving the zone. We were just passing from point A to point B. We kept talking about penetrating, and finally they started doing that. That was a big factor during that stretch of the game.”
Pane, who finished with a game-high 21 points, hit a pull-up jumper on the next possession, and sophomore guard Preston Medlin, who finished with 15 points and five assists, hit a go-ahead 3-pointer one minute later.
Medlin hit his second 3-pointer of the game with 2:35 to play, to give USU its largest lead of the night at 58-47.
BYU made a frenzied comeback attempt in the waining minutes — cutting the lead to five on two occasions — but USU broke BYU’s full-court pressure and hit enough free throws to seal the victory.
USU now prepares for a tough road game against in-state foe Weber State.
“We will have an awfully tough contest in Ogden on Tuesday,” Morrill said. “That’s one of the best Weber State teams I’ve seen in a long time.”
– ty.d.hus@aggiemail.usu.edu
AGGIE FANS CHEER ON men’s basketball team at the Dee Glen Smith Spectrum Friday. USU made a second-half run to defeat BYU. A number of students camped outside for multiple days to get a seat. CODY GOCHNOUR photo