2009-2010 Missouri Valley Conference Basketball

Wichita State vs Texas Tech Basketball Recap

Wichita State 85, Texas Tech 83

After getting just one team into the 2009 NCAA Tournament, the Missouri Valley Conference could be on the comeback trail in 2010. Saturday night's events in America's Breadbasket showed why.

In the kind of result that gets noticed on Selection Sunday, the Wichita State Shockers tripped up 20th-ranked Texas Tech to move to 10-1 on the season and substantially bolster their non-conference resume. The thrilling two-point win at Charles Koch Arena will enable WSU to have a good chance at cracking the field of 65, provided that coach Gregg Marshall's club can deliver a strong top-two finish in the Valley's regular-season standings.

Just how did Wichita whip up something special against coach Pat Knight's Red Raiders? In a word, steadiness.

WSU held the visitors from Lubbock, Tex., to just 21 first-half points en route to a 35-21 halftime bulge. In the second half, however, Tech pushed the tempo on offense, created a helter-skelter game, and rolled up 62 points against an outflanked Wichita defense. The Red Raiders burned very hot and cold in this contest; to put a spin on the old Mae West line, "When they were good, they were very good; when they were bad, they were awful."

Marshall's men - for all their defensive lapses after halftime - were consistent enough and, moreover, resilient enough to stay the course. Tech might have delivered 20 superior second-half minutes, but WSU parlayed its first-half success into a scoreboard advantage over 40 minutes, which is the only measurement that counts in college hoops. Slow and steady won the race for the program that finished seventh in the Valley last season, but is now poised to make a run at the Big Dance. Of all the dependable performers in the Shockers' stable full of talent, nobody seized the spotlight more than Clevin Hannah.

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The 5-11, 155-pound guard might not have carried an imposing frame into this Kansas collision, but Hannah - a senior from Holly Springs, Miss. - provided the pendulum-swinging shots his coach and teammates so urgently needed in the face of Tech's furious second-half comeback.

The Red Raiders - refusing to fold in response to their 14-point halftime deficit - gained a 61-57 lead at the 5:23 mark of regulation. Wichita's huge first half was a distant memory, and the raucous crowd at Koch had been temporarily muted.

Hannah, though, would make the building roar back to life just moments later.

The little guard pulled down a huge offensive rebound off a missed free throw, setting up his own 3-pointer on WSU's second-chance possession. That first bomb tied the score at 61-all with 5:07 remaining. Then, after a steal by teammate T.J. Durley, Hannah drained another dagger from downtown to give the home team a 64-61 edge at the 4:42 mark. As Wichita's offense regained form and flow, Tech could never reduce the margin to fewer than three points until the final second of play, when Red Raider guard David Tairu hit a meaningless 3-pointer with his team trailing by an insurmountable 85-80 margin.

That final window-dressing shot by Tairu illustrated a very important point: While the Red Raiders scored at a reasonable rate, it was the Shockers who hit bigger and more timely shots when the moment demanded them. Clevin Hannah didn't stick unimportant threes in an impossible comeback situation; the upperclassman delivered the goods when a back-and-forth barnburner hung in the balance. By entering the fray at the right time and swishing the night's most important shots, Hannah helped his team strike a big blow for the Missouri Valley, a roundhouse punch that could reverberate through the mid-major world on the afternoon when the NCAA Tournament Selection Show takes place.

By: Matt Zemek
DFN Sports Staff Writer