Austin Peay beat Jacksonville State in a wild affair in Alabama on Saturday, holding off the Gamecocks to move into a tie for first place in the Ohio Valley Conference. You probably heard something about it.
The below video is the run-up to the game-changing Jabari McGhee three-point play which put Austin Peay ahead for good.
I want to call attention to a handful of moments in this clip, what they represent and how they came to be an avatar for the things Austin Peay dealt with on the court Saturday in Jacksonville and really, some of the things the Govs have had to battle all season.
Coming out of the timeout, after Zach Glotta had advanced the ball into the frontcourt, the Pete Mathews Coliseum faithful were on their feet. That crowd in Jacksonville was ELECTRIC all game long, even when the Govs were up double-digits; giving the refs the business, heckling the Governors, right on top of the action. It was a tournament atmosphere, only if 2,787 of the 2,802 people in attendance wanted to see you fail.
You can see JSU players are into it. Understandably; they're 30 seconds away from knocking off two of the league's top-four in the same weekend.
So they thought.
Terry Taylor and Jason Burnell get the free-throw line isolated close-up. By this point, Taylor had 29 points. It wasn't exactly a stretch to think he might get the ball at some point on this possession.
Steve Harris has the ball on the left wing. Zach Glotta is flashing high. Taylor is isolated on Burnell in the low post. This is playing out roughly how one expects.
Harris with the lob into Taylor. At this point, the last field goal made by a Governor that wasn't dropped into the hoop by Taylor had been by Harris with 10:19 to play. Taylor had done a lot of the playmaking and nearly all of the shot-taking down the stretch and here we are, in crunch time, when a big-time player is expected to make big-time plays.
No. 31 you see for Jacksonville State is Christian Cunningham. He's made a career of blocking shots with the kind of aggression that ranks right up there with Chris Horton, Austin Peay's all-time leader. He's sliding down to double Taylor, at worst hoping to force the ball out of his hands at best aiming to swat his shot into the 15th row.
Alright, he's there. Terry is facing the basket, two 6-8 dudes in his face and the clock ticking down. Because he's so good, we forget a lot that Taylor is still just a sophomore. Sophomores aren't usually well-known for their cool under fire and their ability to absorb the situation, process the options and make the right call in a millisecond. In that moment, that twinkling of an eye, with the game on the line and the burden of scoring falling on his shoulders for large swaths of the half, forcing a bad shot wouldn't have been out of the question for a normal player. A normal player—even a good player like Taylor—doesn't always see McGhee cutting to the basket.
Taylor does. He hits McGhee in stride—right in the hands, not too high or too low, allowing him to collect himself and go up strong. Jamall Gregory, giving up five inches and 10 pounds, is late on his rotation and can only hack as McGhee strong-arms the ball up, over and through the smaller defender.
Money. Flex. Celebration. Stunned silence from the home crowd. Miss Joni politely applauding in the corner.
There were still some 20 seconds left after McGhee converted the and-one, but the whole sequence—silencing the hostile crowd, letting the chief playmaker cook, playing unselfishly and doing the job—is about as quintessential as it comes for Austin Peay basketball.
The Govs are at home this week against SIU Edwardsville and Eastern Illinois, Thursday and Saturday after the Austin Peay women's game. Come out to the Dunn Center and watch these guys work.
