It didn’t look good early, but South Dakota State rallied back to beat South Dakota on Saturday by the score of 79-75, giving head coach Scott Nagy his 400th career win in the Jackrabbits final game in the DakotaDome.
“It just means I’ve been fortunate enough to coach for a long time, and I’ve had great assistants and great players,” Nagy said of the reaching 400 wins. “That’s the only way to do that, and I’ve always known that, I’m more proud of the way our kids played tonight.”
The Jackrabbits improve to 16-5 with the win overall and to 5-2 in The Summit League, while the Coyotes fall to 10-11 overall and to 2-5 in the league.
“We weren’t very good early offensively, I thought our kids were playing hard, we just weren’t very good about the first 16 minutes, and then we started to get going,” Nagy said about the Jacks slow start. “We played a lot better offensively the last 24 minutes, but our kids played hard.”
The Jacks trailed 6-5 early, when Coyotes used a 12-2 run to increase their lead to 18-7 with just over 11 minutes left in the half. Bittle snapped the run with a 3-pointer to cut it to 18-10 two minutes later, but the hosts capitalized on Jacks cold shooting to get the lead back to 11 points at 26-15 with just over six minutes remaining in the first half.
Still down 11 with under 3 minutes to play in the first half, George Marshall went on a 7-0 run, and scored the final nine points for SDSU, which ended the half on a 9-2 run to cut the Coyote lead to 32-28 at the break.
The Jacks continued the run into the second half to the tune of 15-2 after a 3-pointer and-1 from Reed Tellinghuisen less than 30 seconds into the half give SDSU a 34-32 lead.
The SDSU lead grew to a high of 49-40 with 14:20 remaining, but the Coyotes came back with an 11-2 run to tie the game at 51, and again at 56 before taking a short-lived lead at 63-62 with 6:52 left, but the Jacks got it right back, and minus a 69-69 tie with just under four minutes left, the Jacks led the rest of the way, using clutch free throw shooting and a Daum 3-pointer to secure the win.
Daum scored a game-high 23 points and a game-high 11 rebounds for his second double-double of the season. Bittle added 21 points and 7 seven rebounds, while Marshall finished with 10 points and four assists.
Casey Kasperbauer led four Coyotes in double figures with 14 points, with Trey Norris adding 12, and both D.J. Davis and Tyler Flack 10 points in the loss.