Caleb Harris
The Ole Miss men’s basketball team could not overcome the early deficit to the UCF Knights in the first half.
The Rebels fought valiantly to try to come back from a 22-point deficit but came up short against the Knights.
Turnovers would plague the Rebels in the game. Ole Miss committed 15 turnovers and UCF scored 18 points off of those turnovers compared to Ole Miss just getting 10 points off the Knights’ 11 turnovers.
“Our team didn’t have a physical approach to it on either end,” head coach Kermit Davis said after the game. “Give Central Florida credit and obviously we settled in and made a run and got it to four (points) when we went with kind of a new lineup in the second.”
After a grueling start to the game in the first half, being down as large as 22-0 to the Knights, the Rebels were able to find a spark offensively provided by junior guard Matthew Murrell, as he would be the only Rebel to score in majority of the first half until his teammates joined in the scoring carousel.
Murrell finished the game with 21 points including a strong 50% from the three point line. Josh Mballa finished with 18 points and shot a steller 7-for-9 from the floor.
Ole Miss fought and clawed their way out of the hole to bring the game back within four points in the mid way point of the second half, but the Knights went on a 13-2 run shortly after making two tough shots to pull away and crush the Rebels’ hope of making history in coming back from the third-largest deficit in program history.
Central Florida’s defense gave the Rebels fits all night and made it quite difficult to put up shots consistently.
“I mean they (UCF) got really good length and good players and they do a lot of switching. They force you to kind of make shots in the perimeter,” Davis said. “I thought we had a lot of opportunities and that early part around the goal, they kind of blocked shots and intimidated us. So that’s something we’ve got to get better.”
The Rebels struggled to control the glass against UCF, a category that must be controlled if they want to win. The Knights out-rebounded the Rebels 36-32 in part due to the length and size of UCF’s players that Davis alluded to.
Davis expressed his concerns for his squad getting off to too many slow starts like against the Memphis Tigers a few games back. He said that he takes responsibility for it and that he has to have his guys more prepared and ready to fight.
The Rebels are now 7-3 and will play the Temple Owls (6-5) on Saturday Dec.17th at 4 p.m. CST at the SJB Pavilion.
