Southeast Missouri State men's basketball team gets expected win vs. TSU

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Southeast Missouri State men's basketball coach Dickey Nutt wrote two words on the board following his team's Ohio Valley Conference contest against Tennessee State on Saturday night -- "Expect it."

He wants his players to believe that they're going to beat everyone on the rest of their conference schedule the way they defeated the Tigers 77-62 to improve to 7-8 overall and 1-1 in the OVC.

"Change your mindset, expect it. Make it a habit," Nutt said. "That's what's wrong with us right now. We don't expect it. We played Belmont great, played them really good, but there was just something missing there at the end that we didn't have that killer instinct to expect us to win that game. That just goes with tradition. It goes with way back when, and I'm not blaming anybody. Right now, it falls on me, it falls on our program."

Southeast started the game on a 17-4 run over the first 5 minutes, 25 seconds that included the Redhawks connecting on their first three 3-point attempts.

The Redhawks led by as many as 22 points with 4:23 left in the first half, but the Tigers closed out the half on a 13-3 run that was concluded with a 3-pointer by Jay Harris with four seconds left to give Southeast just a 42-30 lead at the break.

"They was getting easy shots. No. 5 [Harris] came into the game and was making a lot of 3s, and we [needed] to get out there, but we didn't,' senior guard Jarekious Bradley said. "We were miscommunicating and everything."

Four of TSU's nine first-half field goals were 3-pointers.

"That's scary. I came in at halftime and I jumped them," Nutt said of TSU's run to close the half. "I said, 'Here we go again.' I said, 'Here we are.' I said, 'If we had a 20-minute game, you didn't finish the last five minutes, and that's the story of the Redhawks.' And it goes back to me, what can I do different? I said, 'I'll tell you what I'm going to do different. I'm going to play the guys that are going to play as hard as they can and enthusiastically as they can -- all of that with a combination of sureness and the intensity because we lost the last five minutes and here we are. We put them right back in the game.'"

Southeast pushed its lead to 57-42 with 11:43 left in the game with a three-point play by sophomore Antonius Cleveland.

TSU cut it to 69-61 with 3:24 to go on a 3-pointer by Marcus Roper, but it was as close as the Tigers would come. Bradley, who finished with a season-high 29 points, scored the next seven points of the game before a TSU free throw with about a minute to go.

"I thought our last six possessions, with the exception of Isiah Jones making a nonchalant pass, was to perfection," Nutt said. "You're talking about sureness, we had sureness. We moved that ball, we executed, we got it down low, we finished."

Jones finished with 13 points and seven rebounds and played the entire 40 minutes after being inserted into the starting lineup. Bradley scored his 29 points on 10-of-12 shooting. He was 2 of 3 from behind the arc and 7 of 7 from the free-throw line and had seven rebounds.

"Really proud of the play of Isiah Jones being inserted into the lineup and I thought that was a good move," Nutt said. "He gives us a terrific ball-handler out there. It puts [Jarekious Bradley] in closer to the basket, and JB has proven to be a better player in his new role. I think last game he had two attempts from the 3, tonight he had three, but yet he had 29 points getting to the free-throw line. I thought the adjustments were good."

The Redhawks continue conference action when they host Morehead State and Eastern Kentucky on Thursday and Saturday.

"I was really pleased with our team tonight," Nutt said. "We're inches away, we're one possession away from being 2-0. That's the thing that bothers you a little bit, but I was really proud [of] the way our guys bounced back. We had a good road trip. It's not a great road trip, but it was a good road trip. We prepared well, but I thought the biggest thing is guys buying in to what our gameplan is, and that's dribble-drive the ball, get the ball inside, points in the paint. Getting to the free-throw line is total night and day than it was a couple of weeks ago."