CORPUS CHRISTI – At this time of year when teams have been traveling all over the country playing in holiday tournaments, hitting the floor multiple times in a short timeframe, any win is a good one.
That's why ACU men's basketball coach
Joe Golding was more happy with his team's ugly win Friday over Florida A&M than he was with last Tuesday night's pretty double-overtime loss at Colorado State.
Playing their third game in six days, the Wildcats snapped a modest two-game losing streak Friday evening with a 72-62 win over the Rattlers in the third game of the Corpus Christi Coastal Classic at the American Bank Center. The win pushes the Wildcats to 3-2 on the season and puts them into their bracket championship game, a contest against Oakland (Mich.) that will be played Saturday at 1:30 p.m.
The Wildcats got contributions from all 11 players on the roster Friday in the win over FAMU, including a heroic effort from the bench players, who outscored the FAMU bench 47-21. Freshman point guard
Jaylen Franklin led ACU with 16 points off the bench, while
Jaren Lewis and
Drake Green had 12 points apiece off the bench.
Senior forward
Austin Cooke was the only starter to score in double figures, finishing with 11 points for the Wildcats. The win certainly wouldn't qualify as a thing of beauty, but for Golding and the Wildcats, an ugly win is better than a pretty loss.
"Everybody has been telling us for the last couple of days how great we played at Colorado State and how pretty that loss was," Golding said. "But let's not forget: that was a pretty loss and this was an ugly win. I'll take an ugly win every day of the week, so let's not confuse the two."
ACU grabbed the lead early on and the Rattlers never really threatened to go in front until a quick 11-5 burst out of the halftime locker room cut the Wildcats' lead to 37-35 with 16:10 to play.
But that's when the Wildcat bench stepped to the forefront and turned the tide in the Wildcats' favor for good.
Green scored on an offensive rebound and putback of his own miss before Franklin drove the lane and hit a layup to make it a 41-35 game with 14:27 to play. After a FAMU bucket, senior guard
Parker Wentz – who finished with eight points – buried a corner 3-pointer to push the Wildcats' advantage to 44-37.
Lewis then hit three straight baskets for the Wildcats, the last coming with 8:57 to play to push the lead to 50-38, matching ACU's largest lead of the game. ACU would run the lead out to as many as 14 points (56-42) with 6:37 to play on a nice reverse layup by sophomore guard
Isaiah Tripp and the Rattlers would never get the lead below nine points the rest of the way.
The quartet of Franklin-Green-Lewis-Tripp sparked the win as they combined for 44 of the Wildcats' 47 bench points and 61 percent of the team's point total. Green was active early, sparking the Wildcats when it was clear they were lacking energy, and Lewis and Franklin took over the game late with Lewis grabbing eight rebounds and Franklin relentlessly driving to the bucket. He hit 8 of 10 free throws and is now on pace to shoot more than 180 free throws on the season,
"I could tell at practice (Thursday) and at shootaround (Friday morning) that we weren't ready to play," Golding said. "We just didn't have much 'pop' to us. But Drake was the best player in practice, and I told our assistant coaches that he was going to play a lot of minutes (Friday). He didn't play much against Colorado State, but he came in (Friday) and gave us great energy, a spark offensively and played really good defense.
"That's the thing I really like about this team is that we've got options on the bench that we probably haven't had in the past," he said. "We've got length, we've got offense and we've got guys who want to get on the floor and play. When you're playing in these tournaments and you've been on the road for a long time, you've got to have depth because there are going to be games like this. At this point it's not about Xs and Os; it's about toughness. I love these games because they're ugly and you've got to find a way to win. There wasn't much pretty about this one, but we'll definitely take it."
