Transfers Moody, Rhett lead Ole Miss in comeback win over BYU in First Four
Stefan Moody will shoot. M.J. Rhett will dunk.
These are the fundamental truths following a 94-90 Ole Miss comeback win over BYU in the NCAA tournament's First Four showdown. Following a lopsided first half, the SEC-vs.-WCC matchup turned into a back-and-forth barnburner, and few made larger contributions than the Rebels' two transfers.
In their first seasons with the Ole Miss program, Moody, a shoot-first guard from Florida Atlantic, and Rhett, a low-post scoring threat from Tennessee State, stepped into starting roles and helped return the program to the game's highest stage. With its surprise comeback, Ole Miss enters the 64-team field moving in the right direction.
What coach Andy Kennedy gets out of Moody and Rhett moving forward matters, too, because if the second-half production against BYU can be replicated over the course of an entire game his team is going to be a tough out for a double-digit seed. Rhett was an effective low-post scorer against the Cougars, particularly in the second half, throwing down 20 points on 11 shot attempts.
Then there's Moody, who had the greenest of green lights coming out of the half, hoisting up transition 3-pointers and relentlessly attacking a BYU defense that ranked 140th in defensive efficiency. A hot-and-cold scoring option, Moody finished with a team-high 26 points, leading Kennedy to place his public trust in his 5-foot-10 scorer: "He's our guy."
Kennedy deserves some credit here, too.
Facing a 17-point halftime deficit, his team did not lock up.
The Rebels came out in the second half loose and firing on all cylinders. They outscored the Cougars 62-41 after the break. Those 62 second-half points were the most by any tournament team since 2007.
"At the halftime all we talked about was the battle. Let's battle. We're a good basketball team, if we weren't we wouldn't be here. Let's played like it," Kennedy, who after years of 20-win NIT seasons has his program back in the bracket-busting business, said in his postgame interview. "I just thought we were so tentative. BYU was in control of the tempo ... we wanted to try to impose our will to start the second half. We chopped (the lead) in half pretty quickly, our guys started believing, the ball starts going in, good things happen."
This easily could have gone the other way.
For more than 20 minutes of gameplay, mid-major star Tyler Haws, sidekick Chase Fischer and the rest of the Cougars looked like they had just too much offensive firepower. They looked every bit like the high-scoring upset threat out of the West Coast Conference, the same arsenal that knocked off 2-seed Gonzaga last month. Haws finished with a game-high 33 points and BYU's offense still flirted with the century mark, but the team's old Achilles -- defense; it's finished 90th or worse in defensive efficiency in each of the past three seasons -- came back to bite them. Once Moody & Co. got going, there's was no turning back.
In some ways, this officially puts the Marshall Henderson era in the Ole Miss program's rearview. Of course, the high-profile run when Henderson used up his eligibility and went to play professionally overseas long before the season began, but from a national perspective, Rebels basketball is still associated with the team's high-profile March run in 2013 and the eccentric shooting guard that led them there.
Without Henderson on the roster, there were mixed results this season. Ole Miss suffered bad losses (Charleston Southern, Western Kentucky), but also won six games against KenPom top-50 opponents. Perhaps the team's greatest achievement was pushing No. 1 overall seed Kentucky to overtime in an eventual loss. Few other teams played the undefeated Wildcats better, and it showed the Rebels could be dangerous when locked in. Still, a 20-12 overall record left Ole Miss firmly on the bubble until Selection Sunday put an extra game in their path. But as Ole Miss wins its second NCAA tournament game in the past three years, a new group of players -- including another undersized, volume-scoring transfer guard -- enters the lexicon.
And they've got more to prove.
"We've got another one to knock off," Moody said.
Since the First Four was introduced in 2011, a participant has moved on to win at least one more NCAA tournament game every single season, most notably Shaka Smart's VCU team navigating its way all the way to the Final Four. That's the task at hand for Ole Miss, which moves on to face 6-seed Xavier in the West Regional.
If Stefan Moody is going to continue to shoot the lights out while M.J. Rhett tries to pull the rim off, another upset is certainly on the table for the two-time SEC upstarts.
