FHSU Sports Information<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Defending national champion and No. 6 ranked Central Missouri pushed past Fort Hays State late for an 80-71 win in Hays on Thursday night (Dec. 4) in Hays. The Mules remained unbeaten on the season, moving to 8-0 overall and 1-0 in the MIAA, while Fort Hays State dropped to 4-3 overall and 0-1 in the MIAA.<\/p>\n
The key moment late that gave Central Missouri the cushion it needed was on offensive rebound on a free-throw that led to a three-point field goal by Preston Brunz, pushing UCM’s lead to six with 1:38 to play. UCM went to the line with a two-point lead, made the first free-throw, but got the rebound on the second attempt. The three-point field goal was a dagger the Tigers could not recover from.<\/p>\n
In the first half, FHSU used an 8-0 run to take a 31-25 lead at the 4:53 mark after UCM led by as many as five. A James Fleming<\/a><\/dfn> three-point field goal just before the buzzer put the Tigers up five at halftime, 39-34.<\/p>\n Fort Hays State’s lead grew to seven three times early in the second half, but could not shake the defending national champs. UCM went on a 7-0 run to take the lead back 50-48 with 11:58 to go, but a Craig Nicholson<\/a><\/dfn> three-pointer put the Tigers back in front. The Tigers held a slim lead all the way to the 8:09 mark, but a layup and a three-point field goal on consecutive trips down the floor by TJ White put UCM up by four with 7:32 to play. The Tigers, though, reeled the Mules back in on a Royce Williams<\/a><\/dfn> three-point field goal with 3:48 to go to tie the game. That was the last tie as UCM went on a small 4-0 run and then held the Tigers off the rest of the way.<\/p>\n Nicholson led the Tigers in scoring with 19 points, on 5-of-10 shooting and a 7-of-8 effort at the free-throw line. Dom Samac<\/a><\/dfn> and Royce Williams<\/a><\/dfn> each had 12 points. Three-point shooting kept the Tigers in the game all night, where they went 12-of-22, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the red-hot overall shooting performance by the Mules.<\/p>\n Central Missouri shot 65.3 percent from the field overall (32-of-49) and 70 percent beyond the 3-point line (7-of-10). TJ White led the Mules with 20 points, followed by Dillon Deck with 17 and Rakeem Dickerson with 14. Preston Brunz added 11. White finished the game 8-of-8 from the field and a perfect 2-of-2 at the free-throw line. Deck was 7-of-10 from the field.<\/p>\n The Tigers look to shake off the loss when they host Missouri Western in another conference game on Saturday (Dec. 6) at 4 pm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" FHSU Sports Information Defending national champion and No. 6 ranked Central Missouri pushed past Fort Hays State late for an 80-71 win in Hays… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":142,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3394,7349],"tags":[738,665,4099,69,3466,1677,756,181,111,1378],"class_list":["post-17304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mens-basketball-sports","category-sports","tag-central-missouri","tag-craig-nicholson","tag-dom-samac","tag-fhsu","tag-fhsu-mens-basketball","tag-gross-memorial-coliseum","tag-james-fleming","tag-miaa","tag-missouri-western","tag-royce-williams"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/142"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17304"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17306,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17304\/revisions\/17306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}