By losing to Florida in Gainesville Tuesday night, the Texas A&M basketball team enters what might be a must-win scenario.
The last game of the regular season will be played at 1 p.m. Saturday in Reed Arena against the Alabama Crimson Tide.
Alabama (17-13, 7-10 SEC) comes into the matchup with consecutive defeats. The Crimson Tide’s most recent one came at the hands of Ole Miss on senior night, when the Rebels overcame a halftime deficit to win. In the loss, Alabama senior Levi Randolph finished one shy of his career high, tallying 32 points.
Randolph leads the Crimson Tide in scoring with 15.3 points per game and has logged double-digit performances in all but three games. This includes his outing against A&M on Jan. 6 in the conference opener, in which he shot 3-for-7 from the field with 10 points en route to a 65-44 Crimson Tide victory.
The Aggies (20-9, 11-6 SEC) were without their leading scorer and rebounder at the time, Jalen Jones, because of a reported ankle injury suffered in practice. The current leading scorer, Danuel House, started SEC play sluggishly, racking his third single-digit scoring performance in conference.
House has been dynamite ever since for the Aggies and now leads in scoring, but his early SEC ways came back to haunt him in the past couple games. Against Auburn, House shot 6-for-20 from the field, and in A&M’s last game against Florida, the junior guard was blanked for the first time all season, shooting 0-for-10.
In the final minutes against the Gators, Aggie head coach Billy Kennedy elected to pull him out, and he was seen on the sideline battling an apparent ankle injury.
A win for the Aggies would secure a double-bye in the SEC tournament, which begins next Wednesday. But a loss could sink A&M below the fourth-place spot, as Georgia sits a game behind, having beat the Aggies earlier in the season. With Georgia facing Auburn in its season finale, A&M will almost definitely need to win in hopes of not playing an earlier game on Thursday instead of Friday.
Ending senior night with a bang won’t only guarantee a good spot in the SEC tournament for A&M, but could save its chances of earning a berth in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2011. After the Aggies’ loss to the Gators, they stand as a 10-seed in Joe Lunardi’s latest bracketology and sit in his “Last Four Byes.”
The SEC Tournament will be played next week at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, with the first two contests being played Wednesday night.