Another second-half shooting slide impacted Marshall Men’s Basketball on Wednesday night, as the Georgia Southern Eagles bested the Herd 87-73 in Statesboro, Georgia.
The loss extended Marshall’s losing streak to six games and is the longest stretch of consecutively lost games for Marshall this season.
After a near-even first half, the score was 43-42 at halftime, with the Eagles leading the Herd by a lone point. Marshall kept the contest close in the first half due to their shooting, but it, along with defensive inefficiencies, cost them the ballgame in the second half.
The Eagles outscored the Herd 44-31 in the second half. The Herd shot 6-25, with the Eagles knocking down 17 of its 31 shots.
“They were pushing us out as much as possible,” said Kevon Voyles, whose 22 points in the contest led the Herd. “Taking away the short rolls, amongst other things, to get us off of our rhythm. They spread us out on defense in the second half and attacked us one-on-one.”
Voyles was 9-13 for 20 points in the first half but shot 0-6 from the field in the second half, with the Eagles defense limiting Voyles to just two made free-throws across the final 20 minutes of regulation.
Marshall shot 51% in the first half and only 24% in the second half. It was 6-15 from outside in before the half and finished the contest 8-30 from outside.
Entering the contest, the Eagles were the second-best team in the entire Sun Belt Conference at shooting the three-ball. Marshall’s defense limited Georgia Southern from outside, allowing only 5 three-pointers on 12 shots
“Our game plan was to stop their outside shooting,” said Marshall head coach Dan D’Antoni. “They usually shoot 30 shots from [outside the arc]. We kept them to twelve, but it didn’t matter. When their guards got up inside [the paint], they finished.”
Eagles starting guard Tyren Moore leads his team in the scoring department this season and performed no different versus the Herd, nabbing 23 points and going 10-14 from the field. Moore scored 34 points on Marshall earlier this season on eleven successful shots from the field, both season highs for him.
Moore, though, wasn’t the only guard that performed well for the Eagles on Wednesday evening. Malik Tidwell nabbed 18 points in 18 minutes of game time off of the bench, alongside going a team-best 2-3 from outside the arc. Eugene Brown III also secured 13 more points for Georgia Southern in a contest where three of the Eagles’ four double-digit scorers were guards.
“The good news is we’re playing hard enough,” D’Antoni said. “The bad news is we have to find a way to win games. We’ve got a game to do it, and then another game to do it after that.”
With the loss, Marshall now drops to a 12-18 overall record and 3-8 record on the road this season. The Herd ranks eighth of fourteen teams in the Sun Belt standings with a 7-10 conference record.
Marshall returns to the court to finish out its regular season on Friday, Mar. 1, when the Georgia State Panthers host the Herd in Atlanta, Georgia at 7 p.m.
