GREENSBORO, N.C. – RaeQuan Battle, back straight as a plumb line, rose above Kansas State’s defense for another dead-eye jumper, then turned to shush the Wildcats’ bench.
A year after losing their first-round NCAA Tournament game 97-62 to Texas Tech, the Montana State Bobcats – and especially Battle – left a much stronger impression of themselves at the Big Dance.
Against another 3-seed from the Big 12, though, it wasn’t quite enough in a 77-65 loss to Kansas State at the Coliseum in Greensboro on Friday night.
Battle finished with 26 eye-catching points, launching off the floor to get his jump shot away like a space shuttle headed for orbit. But Kansas State answered every Montana State punch in the second half, letting the Bobcats close to within single digits multiple times but never closer than four points.
“Our season was kind of embodied in this game, to me,” Montana State head coach Danny Sprinkle said. “We just kept battling back and battling back and battling back. … We’ll learn even from this film, but I think going forward it gives our guys a lot of confidence playing Kansas State, one of the top teams in the country, pretty much down to the wire.”
Last season, the Texas Tech loss – in a game that was never competitive – was a resounding rebuke to Montana State’s growth under Sprinkle, a humiliation that sent the Bobcats on a year-long journey that ended with another Big Sky tournament championship and another shot at the national stage.
Friday’s loss, in the final game of a first round that saw plenty of small-school heroics and historic upsets, won’t inspire anything that dramatic.
Unlike a year ago, the Bobcats did plenty of things well. Sprinkle opened the game with both Jubrile Belo and Great Osobor on the floor, seizing the initiative and forcing Kansas State coach Jerome Tang to respond to his gambit.
The Bobcats forced 14 turnovers from the miscue-prone Wildcats, with Osobor tipping numerous passes and backup point guard Robert Ford III diving on loose balls en route to three steals. And, reinforced by Battle’s unbreakable will, Montana State never stopped fighting, epitomized by a late-game sequence when Desi Sills dunked on Battle’s head on a breakaway but the braided superstar answered with a pull-up 3-pointer and raised a defiant finger to his lips as he turned to the Kansas State bench.
“He is a big-time talent,” K-State head coach Jerome Tang said. “He was making tough shots, and that’s what big-time players do. … You can just see that confidence he has as a player. We were trying to limit his touches, and he just pulls up and made big shot after big shot.”
All those positives leave the Bobcats, unlike last year, with no easy answers, no reckoning, no crisis. They could have hit a few more outside shots, sure – Battle was 3 for 5 from behind the arc, but the rest of the team was just 3 for 16. They could’ve made more free throws – MSU went 9-of-17 at the charity stripe. But they played well. They were just playing a team that, despite their best effort, was better.
Point guard Markquis Nowell finished with 17 points, a career-high 14 assists and six rebounds for Kansas State, while Keyontae Johnson had a team-high 18 points and a game-high eight rebounds.
Both are All-Americans, but it was Nowell who had the biggest responses for the Wildcats, hitting a deep 3 to answer one from Nick Gazelas midway through the second half and going on to fire a selection of seeing-eye passes through Montana State’s increasingly desperate defense.
Still, Kansas State didn’t ice the game until there were under three minutes left. After a Darius Brown II 3-pointer, Nowell answered with a laser to Nae’Qwan Tomlin for a dunk to stretch the Wildcats’ lead back out to 10 points. On Montana State’s ensuing possession, Brown lost the ball and intentionally fouled David N’Guessan on the fast break, leading to two points on the free throws and two more on the free possession to make it a 14-point game with 2:15 left.
Montana State’s two-big lineup – “the reason we did it was just to match their size,” Sprinkle said – and Battle’s incandescent start got the Bobcats off to a 12-10 lead after Battle swished a 3-pointer while being fouled and hit the free throw with 13:42 left in the first half.
“Last year and this year, it’s been a big difference,” Battle said. “The first five minutes was a big difference. We were there. We took the lead at one point. I’m just super proud of my team and being able to flip the script from last year to this year.
After a 4-0 Kansas State run gave the Wildcats the lead back, Montana State tied things up twice more in the first half but never took the lead again, and went into halftime down 34-28 after Battle sat the final six-plus minutes of the half with two fouls.
Montana State shot 46.3% from the field but just 9 of 17 from the free-throw line.
“We knew that for them to win, they had to make 3s or shoot 2s at a really high rate,” Tang said. “I felt like we did a really good job of making it tough on them. The other thing is that, for the season, they’ve made more free throws than their opponents attempted, so keeping them off the free-throw line was important to us, and we did a really good job of that.”
In his first year, Tang, a former assistant coach at Baylor, has taken Kansas State to the second round of the NCAA Tournament for the first time in five years.
Montana State, meanwhile, heads into an offseason of change. Jubrile Belo, the only four-time All-Big Sky Conference selection in league history and the centerpiece for Sprinkle the last four years, is moving on after scoring five points and grabbing two rebounds in his final game.
“He has been the cornerstone of our program,” Sprinkle said. “He is an exceptional kid. He has impacted our program. Back-to-back (Big Sky) champion – that goes nowhere near the person he is and the impact he has had on me, on our whole program, on all the young guys coming in.”
His projected replacement, sophomore Great Osobor, added 12 points, seven rebounds and three blocks. With nothing else to play for this season – their place in the story of the season and of March Madness over – the Bobcats are left looking towards the future.
“Now he has to take that next step like Jubrile,” Sprinkle said, speaking about Osobor but talking, it seemed, to everybody on his team. “He has to hold himself to that standard that he played at tonight every night, in practice, in the weight room. … I think after another six months of really taking it serious, he has a chance to be as good as he wants to be.”
