With 12:37 left to play in the game Utah State lead rival BYU 48-46. BYU then went on a 12-0 run and took a 10 point lead that they would not surrender for the rest of the game.
“I thought it was a good game for about the first 30 minutes. We really got in trouble with consistency,” said Utah State Head coach Stew Morrill. “We hit a spell of about six or seven minutes where we played really poorly on both ends of the floor. We turned it over and we couldn’t rebound.”
For the Aggies it was the first time that they had lost a game in the Dee Glen Smith Spectrum to a team inside the state of Utah since BYU did it in 2000.
The Aggies were out-rebounded 46-33 in the game.
“They got to balls before we did,” Morrill said. “I played Chris [Smith] 37 minutes and Jalen [Moore] 36, but I don’t think we were really tired. They just out-quicked us to some balls and that was it.”
BYU grabbed 17 offensive rebounds, 10 more than Utah State, which led to 18 second chance points.
“A lot of them were long bounces, bigs have to go get them and guards have to go get them, everybody has just got to hit their man and we’ve got to have five guys rebounding,” Moore said. “They shot 25 threes and only made five so usually 17 out of those 20 are going to be long rebounds so we’ve just got to have all five guys rebounding.”
Moore had a double-double in the game grabbing 11 rebounds and 15 points. Moore had a third of the team’s rebounds alone.
David Collette fouled out of the game with 4:41 to play after only playing 16 minutes in the game.
“David has just got to stay in games,” Morrill said. “I mean he gets 12 and five and he is out there 16 minutes. We need 30 minutes out of David Collette, he’s got to figure out, like Taj Wesley had to figure out, how to stay on the court.”
BYU also racked up 24 bench points including 17 from Anson Winder while Utah State only managed 4, all from Sean Harris.
“We were having trouble getting much scoring off of the bench and they’ve got guys coming off the bench over 17, 18 and that kind of thing,” Morrill said. “They’ve got a lot of depth, they’ve got a really nice team.”
Chris Smith had 25 points in the game. He was 7-10 from the field including 3-5 from behind the arc and 8-9 from the free-throw line.
“I felt like I just had to,” Smith said.
Darius Perkins also had 21 points.
Tyler Haws led all scorers with 35 points.
“Eventually he is going to make tough shots,” Moore said. “He’s a great player, he’s going to come off of screens and get big shots. I think that we did the best that we could on him.”
