TEMPE, Ariz. -- Eric Jacobsen had 12 seconds of basketball to remember on Sunday, a stretch of time that helped his team to a hard-fought win after an afternoon of shooting struggles.
Jacobsen, a senior center, put in a missed shot with 1.9 seconds left, giving Arizona State a 70-68 win over UC-Santa Barbara.
Jacobsen's bucket came after a big play on the defensive end, a blocked shot with 11 seconds left to give ASU the ball. Then teammate Kodi Justice's jumper was off, and Jacobsen was under the basket for the putback winner. He finished with 10 points and eight rebounds.
"I was hoping it would come off light like it did, and just crashed the offensive board. The ball kind of bounced into my hands," Jacobsen said.
Savon Goodman's 14 points led ASU (4-2), which trailed by five with 90 seconds to play. But Jacobsen made two free throws, Andre Spight hit a 3 and the Sun Devils scored the last seven points of the game.
Arizona State made only 34 percent of its shots from the field (20 of 59), while UCSB took seven fewer shots, made six more and hit 50 percent.
"We just haven't had a game yet where we shot it well from outside," ASU coach Bobby Hurley said. "I know we're capable of doing that. But to shoot that number and to give up 50 (percent), you feel fortunate."
Michael Bryson scored 23 points to lead the Gauchos (2-3). Sam Beeler and Gabe Vincent added 12 points each.
Beeler took a pass from John Green for a Gauchos layup with 1:30 left, giving UCSB a 68-63 lead. But UCSB's last shot as the buzzer sounded from half court was long.
"It was a tough loss," UCSB coach Bob Williams said. "We had two or three times when we were up seven where we really could have put the nail in them and spread that gap to where it would have been a little tougher for them at the end. But give them credit, they made plays and they made shots late in the game to come back."
The Sun Devils failed to hit a shot for almost the first seven minutes of the game and trailed by as many as nine points in the first half. But a UCSB scoring drought with three turnovers in more than three minutes helped Arizona State get back into the game.
ASU took a 17-16 lead on a Goodman layup with 7:24 left in the half. The two teams exchanged the lead for the next few minutes until Beeler dunked with five seconds to go for a 29-27 halftime lead.
The Gauchos committed 11 turnovers in the first half, which also aided the poor-shooting Sun Devils in keeping the score close.
UCSB went ahead 44-38 with a brief 7-0 run early in the second half. A 3-pointer by Vincent punctuated the run with 13:03 to play. The Gauchos held a lead for almost 30 minutes of the game.
"We just have to expect to be in close games," Hurley said. "We've scheduled hard. There's a lot of other opponents that we could have brought here that wouldn't have been of the quality that this opponent was."
TIP-INS
UC SANTA BARBARA: The Gauchos are 0-3 against Pac-12 opponents this season, with losses to Cal, Oregon State before Sunday. They have one more game against a Pac-12 team, Washington, remaining on their nonconference schedule. . Coach Bob Williams, in his 18th season, is the longest-tenured head coach in school history and west of the Mississippi River, one season longer than Gonzaga's Mark Few and San Diego State's Steve Fisher.
ARIZONA STATE: The Sun Devils are 8-2 all-time against the Gauchos. . Head coach Bobby Hurley was given a technical foul for arguing with an official with 13:31 to play in the second half. ... Fans were allowed to toss new or hardly used stuffed animals onto the court at halftime for charity.
UP NEXT
UC-Santa Barbara hosts USC on Dec. 3.
Arizona State at Creighton on Dec. 2.
