White shirts filled the stadium, the band played the fight song and the bright lights of the Pan American Center shined brightly on Saturday night as the University of Texas at El Paso Miners visited Las Cruces for the battle of I-10.
The stakes were high for both NMSU and UTEP, as the two were tied for the fourth seed spot in Conference USA standings. And with only eight games left until the conference tournament and a chance to go dancing in March, sports remain unpredictable. It’s why people love and hate them so much.
The back-and-forth nail biter game resulted in a 66-63 victory for the UTEP miners, the first time in 14 years the Miners were able to defeat the Aggies at home.
“We played like a team that practiced all week without their best player because [Peter Filipovity] had the flu,” Aggie head coach Jason Hooten said. “I thought coaches game plan was great, but my god, they went under screens and and we missed 20 wide open threes.”
Despite the illness limiting Filipovity play time minutes, the Aggies made the Miners fight for the win. However, the lack of star power showed. After getting into a 9-20 deficit late in the first half, Christian cook started to ‘cook’, getting his first points from a three pointer and lay up to shave UTEP’s lead down to three points after some assistance from a Zawdie Jackson layup and free throws from Emmanuel Tshimanga.
UTEP’s Kevin Kalu did his best Cristiano Ronaldo impression, basically telling the fans to ‘calma’ with a powerful dunk before Devon Barnes doubled down with a layup to take a four point lead into halftime. But if theres one thing UTEP head coach Joe Golding made sure of, it’s that his team was ready to get some revenge on the Aggies.
“The last video we watched at about 11 o’clock last night was a video of them celebrating for five minutes on our floor,” Golding said. “We ran it twice and you didn’t hear anybody talk.”
Just because the Miners were motivated though, doesn’t mean a win would come easy. Both Cook and Tshimanga provided some early scoring before the UTEP takeover started. First, a foul on a three point shot by Barnes to led into a timeout, but then Kalu and leading scorer Otis Frazier III got the UTEP lead back up to nine.
The Aggies fought back, mostly from the free throw line and brought the lead just to a striking distance as Robert Carpenter stepped onto the court just in time to hit a jump shot followed a three pointer. His strong moves resulted in an explosion of Aggie cheers from the stands.
Living and dying by the three point shot is a double edged sword. The Aggies felt the pain of being stabbed, shooting only 7-30 from beyond the arc. Even with their poor shooting, Dionte Bostick’s clutch three pointer with only eight seconds left gave the Aggies a chance. Barnes was ready though and with ice in his veins, he sunk not one, not two, not three, but four free throws to ice the game in the final 14 seconds, hitting nothing but net.
If there’s one thing coach Hooten took away from the game, it’s that the Aggie players will be responsible for their own destiny in the seasons home stretch.
“It’s going to go all the way down to the end… I told them in there…we could go eight and 0, we got that kind of team,” Hooten said in the post game presser. “What we gotta do is get everybody healthy and then we just got to get back to playing the way we have at times this year….but we got to do it. You can’t talk about it. You got to get it done.”
