SU men end jinx, topple Grambling
GRAMBLING — The streak is over. No more curses. No bad breaks.
For the Southern men’s basketball team, this season of redemption continued Saturday night, in perhaps the toughest of places.
On a campus that always seemed to get the best of them, the Jaguars slowly erased a 16-point deficit and held Grambling scoreless over the final two-plus minutes, pulling out a 57-53 victory — Southern’s first at Grambling since 2000.
Between then and Saturday, the Jaguars had dropped 11 straight games on their archrival’s home floor.
The losing streak did not end easily, either.
In fact, the Jaguars’ latest win might have been their greatest Houdini act to date.
Before a large, lively crowd of 4,132 fans inside the Hobdy Assembly Center, the Tigers took an early 16-0 lead, and scoring machine Quincy Roberts was hot, scoring 21 of his game-high 27 points in the first half.
SU countered with a career-high 24 points from point guard Jameel Grace — not to mention a high-pressure, turnover-forcing surge early in the second half, which cut Grambling’s lead from 10 points to one.
“It feels good,” Grace said of his 24-point night. “But it feels better to get the win.”
Lately, Southern has gotten used to that.
It was the seventh win in eight games for the Jaguars (12-11, 8-2 Southwestern Athletic Conference), who have seemingly defied every morsel of logic to become instant contenders for first place.
This was, after all, a program that managed only nine wins over the past two seasons. Now they’re alone in second, two games behind Mississippi Valley State.
“I think everybody is surprised to where we are as a team,” first-year coach Roman Banks said. “I’ll be the first to say that I am (surprised), but I’ll say this: I have a lot of confidence in those guys. Like I say, they’re not the great, talented guys. But they’re a good group of guys that want to achieve something.”
After falling into that early hole, the Jaguars achieved a lot.
They cut Grambling’s lead to eight points before Demetri Wheeler’s buzzer-beating putback gave the Tigers a 10-point halftime lead.
During the break, Banks told his players to essentially keep doing what they’d been doing.
“Just do it a little better,” he said.
He also suspected that Roberts — who averages 23.3 points per game — might cool off a little, especially if SU made him work a little harder on both ends of the floor.
After halftime, Southern’s defense attacked in the backcourt, getting two quick steals and easy layups.
“We got right back in the game,” Banks said. “Sometimes, it takes you 10 minutes to catch up. It didn’t take us 10 minutes to catch up. ... At some point, we hoped (we were) close enough to attack them and catch them.”
Attack, they did. Catch up, they did. Southern went ahead for good when Grace scored on a rarely used leaner in the lane with 2:18 remaining.
SU led by three, 56-53, when Grambling (3-17, 3-7) took a timeout with 15.5 seconds remaining.
The Tigers drew up a play for Roberts — but Southern guarded him with freshman Cameron Monroe, and Banks told the next-closest player to attack Roberts when he made his move.
Roberts’ long 3-pointer hit the front of the rim. Monroe rebounded and drew a foul with 4.1 seconds left.
He sealed the game for Southern by hitting his first free throw, putting the Jaguars ahead by four.
“Actually, it’s been a while since I had to do that,” Monroe said.
Presumably, it was worth the wait.