Miami (Ohio) is still perfect, but the No. 21 RedHawks nearly lost their title as the lone unbeaten team in Division I men’s college basketball Friday night in Kalamazoo, Michigan.<\/p>\n
In the game’s waning seconds, freshman guard Trey Perry muscled through the paint to get up a left-handed layup that hit the rim twice before dropping in for the go-ahead basket with 0.4 seconds remaining.<\/p>\n
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That secured Miami’s 69-67 win over Western Michigan.<\/p>\n
The Redhawks (29-0, 16-0 MAC) not only overcame a late deficit but also saw head coach Travis Steele lose his temper earlier in the game.<\/p>\n
At the end of the first half against Western Michigan (10-19, 4-12), a disgruntled Steele hurled words. He was assessed a technical, much to his dismay, and ultimately had to be held back by his own staff as he berated the officials. His outburst culminated in him sending a speaker flying as he entered the tunnel toward the locker room.<\/p>\n
But Steele cooled off, and his RedHawks bounced back from trailing at the half for the sixth time this season \u2014 and then from falling behind by nine points with 6:38 to go \u2014 to defeat the Broncos.<\/p>\n
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Perry’s heroic play completed a short-handed comeback. Miami was down guards Luke Skaljac and Evan Ipsaro, plus Peter Suder \u2014 who fouled out with a team-high 18 points with 7:03 left \u2014 and still found a way to pull through in the clutch, just as it has all season, its best in program history.<\/p>\n
Almar Atlason, a junior forward who transferred in from Bradley and is originally from Reykjav\u00edk, Iceland, netted a pair of 3-pointers down the stretch, including one that he turned into a 4-point play after being fouled. He finished with 16 points and a trio of triples.<\/p>\n
Senior forward Antwone Woolfolk put the RedHawks ahead with 1:45 on the clock, and then Perry answered after Western Michigan’s Justice Williams hit a game-tying jumper.<\/p>\n
“Playing to win. He’s fiery. He’s a competitor. He’s built for those moments, man,” Steele said of Perry in a postgame interview with CBS Sports.<\/p>\n
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“So we put the ball in his hands there at the end. I told him to try to get to the rim, not settle, which he did. He got right to that left hand. … He can finish either hand just equally as well.”<\/p>\n
That versatility served him well and put a bow on his 14-point effort. It also preserved Miami’s unbeaten streak, as it tries to continue its push toward MAC supremacy and its first trip to the NCAA tournament since 2007.<\/p>\n
As for that technical Steele picked up at the end of the first half?<\/p>\n
“Listen, I don’t even know how I got that technical,” he told CBS Sports. “I’m still trying to figure that one out, but that really upset me. And I can’t do that. Can’t get technical fouls. The margin for error is so small, and I got to be better.<\/p>\n
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“We’re fine. We were down at the half, but we didn’t play well. Stay with it. Stay in the moment. Got to win with our defense if we’re going to have a chance to win this game. And that’s what our guys did.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Miami (Ohio) is still perfect, but the No. 21 RedHawks nearly lost their title as the lone unbeaten…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":172553,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[82010,123,125,124,7642,10154,61114,33743,23809,56708,81902],"class_list":["post-172552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-miami","tag-cbs-sports","tag-miami","tag-miami-headlines","tag-miami-news","tag-michigan","tag-ohio","tag-peter-suder","tag-redhawks","tag-technical-foul","tag-travis-steele","tag-western-michigan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}