With just under 10 minutes left to play Saturday at Texas Tech, BYU held a 9-point advantage over the Red Raiders.<\/p>\n
But Texas Tech proceeded to completely stun and shut down the Cougars, ending the contest on a 32-10 run to clinch a 84-71 victory.<\/p>\n
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It was the Red Raiders\u2019 third consecutive win over BYU and the Cougars\u2019 first conference loss of the season.<\/p>\n
\u201c(It was) obviously a super talented BYU team who had us on the ropes,\u201d Texas Tech coach Grant McCasland said after the game. \u201cThe energy in the United Supermarkets Arena is just hard to describe to people until you experience it. … Our guys believed we were going to win the game but we had to do it in a very defensive way.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe last 10 minutes we probably played the best defense we\u2019ve played this year. For as many minutes as our guys played, the grit shows a ton about the compete level of JT Toppin, Christian Anderson and how it\u2019s just oozing throughout the rest of the guys. We are believing we can win no matter what it takes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Texas Tech stars Toppin and Anderson combined for 49 points, but it was their winning defensive effort that McCasland was most impressed with.<\/p>\n
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\u201cI just love seeing JT Toppin and Christian Anderson compete like they did defensively down the stretch,\u201d McCasland said. \u201cThey\u2019re carrying a heavy load on offense playing 40 minutes, but they\u2019re playing defense when it matters the most.\u201d<\/p>\n
BYU\u2019s freshman phenom AJ Dybantsa \u2014 who played for McCasland this past summer for Team USA in the FIBA U19 World Cup \u2014 turned in the worst performance of his collegiate career thus far, scoring 13 points on 6 of 17 shooting, only getting to the free throw line once and coughing up three turnovers.<\/p>\n
But though his team was quite successful in making Dybantsa\u2019s life difficult, McCasland still had plenty of praise for the heralded NBA prospect.<\/p>\n
\u201cAJ\u2019s really good, he\u2019ll bounce back,\u201d McCasland said. \u201cI mean, he\u2019s a load to handle as we all saw.<\/p>\n
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\u201c… Ton of respect for BYU, obviously it\u2019s a crazy good team and we know we\u2019ll get an opportunity to play them again. So, just respect to those guys and coach (Kevin) Young for how they compete.\u201d<\/p>\n
With the win, Texas Tech is now 14-4 on the season and 4-1 in Big 12 play, as defeating BYU could prove to be a major confidence boost for the Red Raiders considering their upcoming schedule of facing Baylor, Houston, UCF and Kansas over the next two weeks.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn our league, you better take the things that you know put you in those positions to win the game and you better try to double down on it,\u201d McCasland said. \u201cDon\u2019t think you\u2019ve arrived, because man, this league, you go on the road, you can get beat by anybody on any night and get beat bad.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just hope what (beating BYU) does is it anchors us to the core principles of how we want to defend and our guys start to see the the the way you beat teams is (by) getting stops.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With just under 10 minutes left to play Saturday at Texas Tech, BYU held a 9-point advantage over…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":128854,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[14862,17321,19642,42435,14855,305,168,170,169,42436,27,1769],"class_list":{"0":"post-128853","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-lubbock","8":"tag-aj-dybantsa","9":"tag-byu","10":"tag-christian-anderson","11":"tag-grant-mccasland","12":"tag-jt-toppin","13":"tag-kansas","14":"tag-lubbock","15":"tag-lubbock-headlines","16":"tag-lubbock-news","17":"tag-mccasland","18":"tag-texas","19":"tag-texas-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128853\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}