 "Photo: Sam Smith")
Texas A&M men's basketball Head Coach Mark Turgeon said the number of students who camped out in front of Reed Arena before the Aggies' game against the No. 20 Baylor Bears sure got their money's worth Saturday.
The Aggies, now 17-6 overall and 6-3 in Big 12 conference play, defeated the Bears 78-71 in a wire-tight game just hours after devoted Reed Rowdies set up tents and waited in the cold weather to be the first inside the sanctuary of their namesake.
A&M senior forward Bryan Davis opened the game for the Aggies with a string of dropped passes and turnovers that held A&M from scoring a field goal until the 16:01 mark.
"Bryan was about as bad as you can get in the first ten minutes," Turgeon said. "But then he was about as good as you can get in the rest of the game."
Davis turned his game around and finished with a team-high 22 points, eight of which came out of his nine free throw attempts. Davis and the Aggies finished shooting a season-high 85 percent from the charity stripe.
"We've put in a lot of work in the past week shooting them," Davis said. "Guys are coming up here late at night and shooting, or before practice, after practice, even during practice. That's just one reason we were successful from the line tonight."
The Bears led the entire first half and at one point were up by a 12-point margin.
But senior A&M guard Donald Sloan got the Aggies some momentum back with a fast break dunk around three Baylor players to bring his team within 10.
Freshman forward Ray Turner, who laid an emphatic dunk over Missouri's Kim English just three days earlier, picked up on Sloan's lead and scored the Aggies' next seven points to bring the score to just a two-point difference.
The Aggies were unable to take the lead, however, and went into halftime trailing 35-32.
In the second half, A&M took its first lead of the game almost immediately after a strange foul on senior Baylor center Josh Lomers.
After a play that left A&M's Davis on the ground, Lomers tripped over him and clipped his head with his foot. Davis was shaken up, but was able to drain two technical free throws and finish the game.
"Obviously Josh didn't do anything intentionally," said Baylor Head Coach Scott Drew. "It's hard for him to jump over people, he's vertically challenged as they would say."
Just after the play, sophomore forward David Loubeau scored a layup to put the Aggies up 36-35, the first lead of the game.
Throughout the game, the Aggies were consistently poor from 3-point range, making only one trey in the first half.
But junior guard B.J. Holmes would find his stroke with 5:19 remaining in the game and sink two long balls in back-to-back procession. Holmes finished with 10 points and was 3 for 7 from behind the arc.
"He's our shooter," Sloan said. "He's our go-to guy when we need a three. Just because he misses a couple, that's not going to change. I felt like if he could get the ball with any kind of space, even an inch, he should be able to put it up."
The Aggies closed down defensively in the final seven minutes of the game, allowing just seven points in the span to close out the game with its third upset of a Top-25 ranked team in the 2009-2010 season.
The win is A&M's third in a row and its fifth out of its last six games.
A&M has a break from mid-week action before returning to road Saturday with a contest against Texas Tech in Lubbock.
