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Men’s Basketball: Lobos to host Tennessee Tech in second round of Emerald Coast Classic

After a 19 point loss to New Mexico State on Friday in Las Cruces, the Lobos (2-1) will try to rebound with a win at home against the Tennessee Tech Golden Eagles.

As for TTU (3-1), they only have one loss on the season to Texas Christian University—a team that had received votes in national polls.

More recently, though, the Golden Eagles are coming off a victory against Kennesaw State.

In UNM’s loss to the Aggies last week, they were dominated on the board, being outrebounded by their rival 50-25 while 25 of those were NMSU offensive rebounds, ultimately leading to 23 second chance points.

“Spent a lot of time on rebounding obviously since the New Mexico State game,” head coach Paul Weir said at a press conference on Monday. “Very troubling execution at that end of the floor as much as we want to tip our hat to them and they did a great job there, there’s a lot that we needed to clean up and that was pretty much yesterday’s practice and will be today’s practice as well.”

TTU, however, in their last win, saw a 21 point performance from Curtis Phillips Jr., who also leads the team in points per game at 15.8.

The Golden Eagles also have three others who are averaging in double digits in points per game this season, with senior guard Aleksa Jugovic (12.5), guard Shaq Calhoun (12.3) and senior forward Mason Ramsey (11.5).

So far this season, TTU has also been averaging 86.5 points per game, while holding opponents to 68–a product of playing smaller, less talented schools.

They have also been shooting 51.5 percent from the field as a team, while the Lobos are shooting 50.9 percent.

One thing, though, is that the Lobos, too, are scoring a lot early on. As a team, they are putting up an average of 102 point per game while holding teams to 72.

Leading the charge for them is junior guards Chris McNeal and Troy Simons, who are both averaging 14.3 points per game, respectively.

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Simons, however, was hit with two technicals on Friday at NMSU, which ultimately got him ejected from the game.

The Lobos, who Weir said wants to have lead the nation in turnovers, were broken down on defense by a good NMSU team. However, in the Lobos’ two prior games, forced 33 and 26 turnovers, respectively, while in the game against the Aggies they were held to 14 forced turnovers.

Tip-off for the Lobos’ game against TTU is at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 21 at Dreamstyle Arena.

Matthew Narvaiz is a senior sports reporter for the Daily Lobo. He primarily covers men’s and women’s basketball, and baseball. He can be reached at sports@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @matt_narvaiz.

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