{"id":195143,"date":"2026-03-07T22:28:51","date_gmt":"2026-03-07T22:28:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/195143\/"},"modified":"2026-03-07T22:28:51","modified_gmt":"2026-03-07T22:28:51","slug":"liberty-79-72-sam-houston-mar-7-2026-game-recap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/195143\/","title":{"rendered":"Liberty 79-72 Sam Houston (Mar 7, 2026) Game Recap"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>LYNCHBURG, Va. &#8212; \u2014 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.espn.com\/mens-college-basketball\/player\/_\/id\/5107069\/zach-cleveland\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Zach Cleveland<\/a>&#8216;s 19 points helped Liberty defeat Sam Houston 79-72 on Saturday.<\/p>\n<p>              Cleveland also contributed nine rebounds and nine assists for the Flames (25-6, 17-3 Conference USA). <a href=\"http:\/\/www.espn.com\/mens-college-basketball\/player\/_\/id\/5242130\/brett-decker-jr\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Brett Decker Jr<\/a>. added 16 points and five rebounds. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.espn.com\/mens-college-basketball\/player\/_\/id\/5107070\/colin-porter\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Colin Porter<\/a> shot 4 of 12 from the field to finish with 15 points.<\/p>\n<p>              <a href=\"http:\/\/www.espn.com\/mens-college-basketball\/player\/_\/id\/4897888\/veljko-ilic\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Veljko Ilic<\/a> finished with 21 points and two steals for the Bearkats (21-10, 13-7). <a href=\"http:\/\/www.espn.com\/mens-college-basketball\/player\/_\/id\/5314535\/jacob-walker\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Jacob Walker<\/a> added 13 points for Sam Houston. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.espn.com\/mens-college-basketball\/player\/_\/id\/5117648\/kashie-natt\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Kashie Natt<\/a> had 16 rebounds and 11 points.<\/p>\n<p>              Liberty led Sam Houston at the half, 41-31, with Cleveland (12 points) its high scorer before the break. Cleveland&#8217;s layup with 1:39 left in the second half gave Liberty the lead for good at 70-68.<\/p>\n<p>              &#8212;&#8212;<\/p>\n<p>              The Associated Press created this story using technology provided by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dataskrive.com\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Data Skrive<\/a> and data from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sportradar.com\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Sportradar<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LYNCHBURG, Va. &#8212; \u2014 Zach Cleveland&#8216;s 19 points helped Liberty defeat Sam Houston 79-72 on Saturday. Cleveland also&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":195144,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[56,58,57],"class_list":{"0":"post-195143","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-houston","8":"tag-houston","9":"tag-houston-headlines","10":"tag-houston-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195143","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=195143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195143\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/195144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}