The Texas A&M faithful silently filed out of Reed Arena on A&M senior day Saturday afternoon with a bitter taste in their mouths.
Their team’s 61-60 defeat to the Alabama Crimson Tide marked its second consecutive loss to conclude the regular season and put a damper on head coach Billy Kennedy and his team’s postseason aspirations.
“I can’t control that,” Kennedy said. “RPI, BPI, I said it, CPI. I don’t know what they look at. I know we’ve got a very good basketball team. We’ve really had some quality wins, we’ve been solid all year, we’ve been good all year. I hope the NCAA committee, you know, they’ll make a good decision and, they’ll pick the right schools that deserve to be in it.”
The Aggies (20-10, 11-7), who played without the help of leading scorer Danuel House due to a nagging foot injury, could not avenge their 21-point defeat to the Crimson Tide (18-13, 8-10) from earlier in the season despite holding a 14-point lead at halftime.
At the beginning of the game, though, it appeared that the performances of the Aggies two lone seniors, Jordan Green and Kourtney Roberson, would carry them all the way to the finish line.
Green shot right out of the gate by scoring the first six points of the game for A&M, often on the receiving end of transition passes and then driving the ball hard toward the hoop. He reached double-digit points by the 12:32 mark of first half, but it wasn’t enough for the Aggies Saturday.
“Basketball is what I do, it’s not who I am,” Green said. “I love Reed Arena. I love the 12th man, but my life is going to go on. I’ve had a wonderful time playing under coach Kennedy, playing with the guys in white, and I love playing in front of Reed, but we just didn’t get the job done and it wasn’t meant to be. It’s just what we do. It’s not who I am. It doesn’t change me. I’m Jordan Green.”
With under seven minutes remaining in the first half, the Aggies led the Crimson Tide 21-17 when Alex Caruso pushed a defensive rebound up the floor with a cross court pass to Green who then dumped off a no-look, under hand pass to a trailing Roberson for a two handed jam, fueling the 9,064 fans on hand at Reed Arena.
On the ensuing possession, Caruso then intercepted and saved an errant Alabama pass at mid court. The ball eventually found its way into the soft-shooting hands of Peyton Allen in the corner for what would be his third 3-pointer of the half.
The Aggies first-half fortunes took a turn for the worse with the arrival of the second half as seven fouls were called on them in under five minutes of play, which Alabama capitalized on as part of a 14-4 run, narrowing the lead to 40-36 with 15:20 remaining.
“You got to give Alabama credit,” Kennedy said. “I thought they showed good character. In the first five minutes of the second half, or even more than that, they came out the aggressor. Our guys played back on their heels a little bit, for whatever reason. We had our opportunities and just couldn’t get it done.”
Alabama took the lead at the 12:31 mark with a three pointer from their team’s leading scorer on the season, Levi Randolph. Randolph then added an and-one layup at the 9:57 mark to extend Alabama’s lead to four, 46-42. Randolph was one of four Alabama players in double digit scoring, finishing with 11 points.
Texas A&M relied on the scoring efforts of several players, including four 3-pointers split between Davonte Fitzgerald and Alex Robinson and a pair of scrappy buckets in the paint from Roberson, to keep the game close, and even briefly recover their lead a few times, but Alabama responded each time with key buckets of its own.
A&M had a chance trailing by one with 10.7 seconds remaining to win the game outright. Coming out of a Kennedy timeout, Allen inbounded the ball to Caruso who then gave it back to Allen. Allen funneled the ball inside to Roberson on the post. Defensive pressure, though, forced Roberson to kick it back out to Allen who heaved up a 3-pointer, but it clanked off the rim and out of bounds, which all but ended the game.
“It’s basketball, man,” Green said. “Something happens each game. Unfortunately something happened with us and we didn’t play with energy. Basketball is what we do, it’s not who we are. I mean it’s tough to lose a game like that, especially one that we needed so desperately, but hey man, it wasn’t meant to be, and we are just going to keep fighting … It’s tough man, but we’ve got some more basketball to play.”
Texas A&M now awaits seeding for the upcoming Southeastern Conference tournament, which starts Thursday in Nashville, Tennessee.