UTC men lose at Wofford, will be SoCon No. 7 seed
Repeating as Southern Conference tournament champions was already going to be a difficult task for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men’s basketball team.
After Saturday night, it didn’t get much easier.
The Mocs lost 86-74 to Wofford in Spartanburg, South Carolina, finishing Dan Earl’s first regular season as UTC coach at 15-16 overall with a 7-11 mark in the SoCon.
UTC entered Saturday in a three-way tie for fifth place in the standings with the Terriers and East Tennessee State, but those two teams winning pushed the Mocs down to the seventh seed in the Socon tournament and a play-in game against Virginia Military Institute — Earl’s former team — at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Harrah’s Cherokee Center in Asheville, North Carolina.
Five players scored in double figures for the Mocs, led by KC Hankton’s 14 points. Demetrius Davis scored 13, while A.J. Caldwell had 12 with nine rebounds, and Brody Robinson and Dalvin White had 11 each and combined for five assists with no turnovers.
The Mocs actually scored more points in the paint than Wofford, 32-28, but the Terriers dominated on the boards, holding a 40-26 advantage and turning 15 offensive rebounds into 22 second-chance points.
Wofford (16-15, 8-10) broke open a 64-63 game with a 10-0 run, highlighted by consecutive 3s by Jackson Paveletzke and Carson McCorkle. The Mocs went five minutes without a basket before a putback by Caldwell with 4:14 to play.
“Credit to Wofford. They played extremely hard,” Earl said on the postgame radio broadcast. “I thought they were faster than us throughout the game and they had 15 offensive rebounds, which is way too many. We gave them a ton of second-chance points, which really hurt us.”
The Mocs will be in the play-in round for the first time since being the No. 10 seed in the 2017-18 season.
“The season is broken up into three different parts. You’ve got the nonconference, the conference and then the postseason,” Hankton said. “We’ve got to wash this away; it’s a new slate and we have to try to go win however many games it is.”