Bumbling Aggies’ dreams dashed in rout
DES MOINES, Iowa — Texas A&M’s goal of playing 100 miles from campus in the Final Four in Houston fell nearly 1,000 miles short on a bitter cold, slushy night in the Midwest.
The frigid Aggies might as well have been shooting in the sleet and snow just outside the Wells Fargo Arena doors in their first appearance in the NCAA Tournament in five years.
Tenth-seeded Penn State poured it on against seventhseeded A&M 76-59 in a mild upset late Thursday night, although the Nittany Lions appeared to be the better team throughout the two anguishing hours for A&M fans.
“They played incredibly well,” A&M coach Buzz Williams said, “and we played incredibly poor.”
The Nittany Lions (23-13) live and die by the long ball, and in their first game against the Aggies (25-10) in six years not only lived by the 3-pointer but thrived on it in building an insurmountable 38-22 lead at halftime.
The wounded Aggies never came close to threatening in an anticlimactic second half, and Penn State finished 13-of-22 (59 percent) from the 3-point line.
“We were completely stretched in what they were doing offensively,” Williams said. “And we were not sharp in our help on (star guard Jalen Pickett) and our coverage on the weak side. … The problem tonight was as much as we could have been better on offense, our problem was defensively.”
The Aggies, who narrowly missed the NCAA Tournament last year before barely losing to Xavier in the National Invitation Tournament title game, had designs on ending their season with a happy bus ride to Houston for the Final Four in NRG Stadium in early April.
Instead A&M, despite finishing second in the Southeastern Conference to top overall seed Alabama, finished the season with two losses by a combined 36 points, following an 82-63 setback to the Crimson Tide in the SEC tournament title game Sunday in Nashville, Tenn.
The Aggies in non-conference play lost to Wofford in Reed Arena in December, and that headscratching version of A&M reared its head on college basketball’s brightest stage.
A&M (briefly) played in its first NCAA Tournament since 2018 and first under Williams, who’s in his fourth year. The last time the Aggies competed in the NCAA postseason they made the Sweet 16 in 2018 under then-coach Billy Kennedy.
A&M also made the Sweet 16 in 2016 in its prior NCAA Tournament appearance, but on Thursday exited the tournament in the first round for the first time since 2011 under then-coach Mark Turgeon.
The Aggies on Thursday also failed to uphold their end of the deal in creating a Lone Star showdown far north of Central Texas. Penn State and second-year coach Micah Shrewsberry instead will face second-seeded Texas on Saturday night for the chance to advance to the Sweet 16 in Kansas City, Mo., next week.
While the Nittany Lions are led by the second-team AllAmerican Pickett, long-range bomber Andrew Funk spent a good chunk of the night consistently poking the staggered Aggies in the side with his sharpshooting. The former Bucknell standout hammered the Aggies with a game-high 27 points in making eight of 10 3-pointers.
Funk said opposing defenses keying on Pickett makes his job — launching 3-pointers — much smoother.
“It really came to fruition tonight,” Funk said.
A&M has three seniors in its 10-man rotation in Dexter Dennis, Tyrece Radford and Andre Gordon, but Radford and Gordon have the option of returning for one more year because the NCAA did not count a year of eligibility in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A&M sophomore guard Wade Taylor IV earned first team AllSEC honors this season but was cold when it counted against the Nittany Lions in finishing 2-of-15 from the floor. A&M shot 29.4 percent from the 3-point line (10of-34) and wasn’t much better overall, in making 33.9 percent of its shots from the field (20-of-59).
“We knew how good they were,” Shrewsberry said of A&M finishing 17-4 against SEC foes this season. “We played hard and gave ourselves a chance to win.”