HOMEWOOD – For the second-straight game, the Samford Bulldogs found themselves in a massive early hole thanks to a slow start on offense. For the second-straight game, they clawed back to make the game close late.
However, they could not win for the second-straight game.
The Furman Paladins grabbed control late in a hostile road environment at the Pete Hanna Center and secured the 80-72 win on Wednesday, Feb. 19. The victory swept the season series between the rivals and gave the Bulldogs their third loss in the last four games, leaving them in third place in the SoCon and two games off the top with three to go.
“At the end of the day, that’s just kind of how it shakes,” Samford coach Bucky McMillan said. “Most of the time the last five minutes, it’s just who’s going to make the most plays, and I thought that they did. They didn’t miss free throws, Pjay Smith played really well and as good as a lot of some of our guys played to get us back in the game, we didn’t play great the last five minutes and make the plays kind of you got to to do that.”
One of the consistent bright spots of the night was Jaden Brownell. The big man dominated the offensive end early for Samford to give it a 9-5 lead at the under-16 media timeout. He went on to lead the team with 25 points off 10-for-16 shooting and 5-for-9 from deep with five rebounds.
However, Furman quickly responded with a pair of 3-pointers before tying it up at 13-13. Julian Brown stole the momentum right back with a four-point play, leading to another 3-pointer from Collin Holloway to make the lead 20-13. The back-and-forth continued with a 9-0 run from Furman capped off by an alley-oop dunk to give the Paladins a 22-20 lead. That silenced the Samford fans but only briefly since Collin Holloway made another 3-pointer to retake the lead ahead of the media timeout with 9:55 left in the first.
Furman brushed off the blow and scored 21 of the next 23 points, taking the visitors from down two to up by 15. After dominating the game with a fast-paced playstyle, Furman coach Bob Richey yelled at his bench, “That’s how we want to play!” It clearly worked as Samford went over seven minutes without scoring a point, leaving them behind for good. Josh Holloway broke the scoring drought with a dunk with 1:10 left in the half, and Brownell followed that up with an emphatic 3-pointer, forcing a timeout with 15.2 seconds left.
The Bulldogs’ 5-0 run to end the half cut the deficit to 43-30, but Furman raced out of the gate in the second half. The Paladins went on an 8-0 run to extend the lead to 21 and force Samford’s third timeout with 17:25 remaining. However, with their backs against the wall, the Bulldogs refused to give up. Big 3-pointers from Trey Fort and Josh Holloway kicked off a Samford run that reenergized the home crowd. Brownell paced the offense with a trio of 3-pointers over the next six minutes to get him over 20 points for the game.
Furman couldn’t get anything to fall from the field, and Samford attacked the rim to capitalize.
Josh Holloway put a defender on skates ahead of a drive to the rim to cut the deficit to six, and he made another layup out of the under-8 media timeout to make it a four-point game.
The Paladins tried to keep Samford at bay from the free throw line, but the Bulldogs kept chipping away at the deficit. First, a Fort 3-pointer to cut it to three. Then, a Lukas Walls tip-in to cut it to two. Finally, Rylan Jones got a layup off a turnover to tie the game at 64-64 and send the Pete into a frenzy with 3:44 left.
Furman responded out of the media timeout with four free throws capped off by its first field goal in eight-and-a-half minutes: a Pjay Smith step-back 3-pointer to make it a 70-64 lead with 1:40 left. That proved to be the dagger as the Paladins kept the Bulldogs at an arm’s length down the stretch and walked away with the eight-point win.
In addition to Brownell’s 25 points, Fort and Josh Holloway each had 14 points, but they came on inefficient shooting nights as Fort went 5-for-12 while Holloway was 5-for-14 overall and just 2-for-8 from three. The pair were far from the only Bulldogs who struggled shooting as Jones went 2-for-9 overall and 0-for-4 from deep. McMillan bemoaned the poor shot selection at the tail end of their runs and called on his players to do better.
“At halftime, we watched our bad shots and said, ‘If we’re going to do this, we’re not got much of a chance to win, because the teams in our league that are more half-court-based teams, they’re not going to settle for that, so you’re in a massive bind when you do that,’” McMillan said. “And so, some of them were like turnovers because we settled for them so early in shot clock.” While McMillan gave credit to Furman’s veteran core for playing to their true skill level and not the form they had shown during SoCon play, he challenged his players to play with intelligence and intensity from start to finish while keeping their composure.
He said that the Bulldogs had every chance to win the game and repeat last Saturday’s success. However, he couldn’t get consistent results from his entire bench, which he believes they need to win a conference championship. “We could win that game just like we won at Wofford,” McMillan said. “There’s no difference in those games, like how they went. But you can’t win a championship until you have everybody dialed in to play for 40 minutes plus overtime with reckless abandon, and then on the offensive end, totally understand and not get caught up in the motions of the game, what a quality shot is over and over and over and over.”
Samford will have a chance to improve in its final home game of the season on Saturday, Feb. 22 at 2 p.m. against the Western Carolina Catamounts.
This article was written by Andrew Simonson. Follow his other work on X and Instagram
@andrewtsimonson.