Although the Mississippi State Lady Bulldogs basketball team celebrated Senior Day for all but five players, the game that followed the pre-game ceremony is one they would rather forget.
MSU turned in their worst offensive performance of the season, shooting only 28 percent against Auburn, a team the Lady Bulldogs scored 73 against on the road earlier this year. Auburn returned the favor Sunday by defeating MSU, 50-36.
Head coach Sharon Fanning-Otis started with a familiar lineup of seniors Alexis Rack, Armelie Lumanu, Chanel Mokango, Tysheka Grimes and junior Mary Kathryn Govero, who together have accounted for over 80 percent of MSU’s scoring this season.
However, only Mokango scored more than her average with 12 points to lead the team, while team leader Rack contributed a lone 3-pointer. Govero, Grimes and Lumanu added 9, 8 and 4 points respectively, each well short of their average.
For Auburn, junior guard Alli Smalley led all scorers with 17, and senior center KeKe Carrier tallied 12 points.
Mississippi State’s shooting was suspect all day long, sinking 14 of 50 overall, but their downfall came from turnovers. The Lady Bulldogs committed 18 errors, which led to 17 points for Auburn.
After the game, an angry Fanning-Otis spotlighted turnovers as one of the biggest factors in the loss.
“Turnovers I think is the biggest glare,” she said. “In the first half there were seven unforced turnovers at least. We turned the ball over 18 times. You’re not going to beat anybody in the league doing that. You won’t win a game if you don’t take care of the basketball.”
Fanning-Otis said that up and down practices, and the distractions of Senior Day could also have played a part, but she said she expected the seniors to pick up in the second half where MSU started down by only three points.
“We have not been mentally focused the way we have to be to play hard,” she said. “If you work hard enough from a practice standpoint, you’re not going to give it up in a game. You’re not going to give in. We played passive, and we got kicked.”
When asked what happened, Rack also blamed a lack of energy on defense for the loss.
“[There was a] lack of energy,” she said. “I think that led to everything else. Defensively, we weren’t alert and we didn’t get many rebounds. We let shooters shoot. Alertness and energy were down.”
Govero agreed with Rack and said that their defense just did not get it done.
“Yeah, I mean our defense is what usually leads to better production on offense and we just weren’t getting stops tonight,” she said. “You could just look and you didn’t see the look in everybody’s eyes that you need to win the game. As a result, we didn’t.”
Rack said she did not think the extra activities of Senior Day affected her focus before the game, but the thought of playing her last game in the Hump was still on her mind.
“It hit me when we were doing our walkthrough, but we were really just trying to finish the season at home off strong,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh this is our last game.’ I was really just trying to focus on finishing off strong. This isn’t really how you want to end your career at home, but you have to deal with it.”
MSU has just two games remaining in the regular season, Thursday at Alabama and Sunday at LSU. Fanning-Otis said that she will put the Auburn game behind them and get ready for Bama.
“What we’ll do as a staff is get them ready, and mentally hopefully they’ll understand the urgency with which they’ll have to play when we play at Alabama on Thursday,” she said. “And that’s all I’m gonna focus on. So right now, we will regroup and we will get back to work, and if they stay in this uniform, they’d better be ready to work too.”