Dominique Josephs fouled out. Kevin Moore fouled out. Elijah Neumann fouled out. Tyrique Weaver limped off the court with an ankle injury. Bryce Simmons limped off the court with a dead leg. Nicho Burgard suffered a concussion.
Everything that could have gone wrong in the final stretch of the Northern New Mexico College men’s basketball game at New Mexico Highlands University, Nov. 18, did go wrong.
The Eagles stuck with the Cowboys for a majority of the game, with some high tempo, back-and-forth play. At halftime, the game was tied, 36-36.
Midway through the second half, Highlands began to drift away, as Northern lost a good portion of the starting line-up and the Cowboys capitalized with some dangerous fast breaks, coupled with ball movement that the Eagles could not handle.
“They did a good job of hitting the offensive blast,” Northern head coach Ryan Cordova said. “That’s where we fouled most of the time, on the offensive blast. We’re not boxing people out … Then, just hitting shots. They hit a couple big shots.”
Highlands won the match-up, 90-81. The game marked a 10th consecutive loss for the Eagles, despite not having played another National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics team in five games.
The last four games were against National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I and Division II programs.
“At this point, we’re on a 10-game losing streak, I think,” Simmons said. “So any game we go into, we want, so we can change it around.”
The Eagles schedule does not get any easier, with the next two games on the road against the University of Northern Colorado, Tuesday, and the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, Nov. 27.
They will not catch any breaks on the upcoming schedule, but if they reproduce the same level of performance they gave against Highlands, then they should give those Division I and Division II programs a decent amount of trouble.
Before the Cowboys began to pull away from them, around the 60-point mark, the Eagles were able to work a couple of aspects of the offensive game that the Cowboys were unable to guard.
Josephs, a 6-foot-9 senior, was an unstoppable force at center. Highlands did not have a big man with the ability to control his size and post moves. He had 10 points, before he fouled out.
“They couldn’t guard him,” Cordova said of Josephs. “And we stopped going to him … We’ve got to be able to consistently pound that ball inside.”
Additionally, the Cowboys were unable to defend against Simmons’s speed and shooting ability from the perimeter.
He consistently was able to beat his man, rush inside and drain a mid-range jump shot.
Simmons has been Northern’s highest scorer this entire season and proved himself again at Highlands, scoring 21 points, before sustaining an injury.
He saw the positives in the team’s loss.
“For the most part, I feel like we could have made some more free throws and got some more defensive stops,” Simmons said. “Overall, we did pretty good as a team. We did a lot better.”
Walid Aly was the second-highest scorer for the Eagles, at 19 points, although, he failed to hit his stride until it was too late in the game to make a major difference.