Elmore, Marshall stop Southern Miss 85-75, reach title game

FRISCO, Texas (AP) — Jon Elmore scored 26 points and drained a timely 3-pointer after a seemingly comfortable lead disappeared to hold off Southern Miss 85-75 in the Conference USA semifinals on Friday and advance to the championship game for the second-straight year.

Marshall (23-10), the No. 4 seed, will meet third-seeded Western Kentucky (24-9) in Saturday’s championship game.

Ninth-seeded Southern Miss (16-18), which toppled two-time defending champion and No. 1-seeded Middle Tennessee, 71-68, in overtime in the quarterfinals, put a scare into Marshall. The Golden Eagles steadily whittled a 24-point gap down to six, 71-65, with three minutes left. Marshall had gone without a field goal for the better part of six minutes and SMU was on an 11-0 run.

That’s when Elmore stepped up to hit the big 3-pointer with 2:13 remaining, to blunt the Golden Eagles rally. Marshall was 10-for-10 at the line in the last 1:14.

Elmore was 7 of 7 at the line and made five 3-pointers with nine rebounds and nine assists. Jannson Williams added 17 points.

Cortez Edwards led the Southern Miss comeback with 30 points on 12 of 19 shooting, his fourth-straight game of 20 or more. Tyree Griffin added 19.

Free News Delivery by Email

Would you like to have the day's news stories delivered right to your inbox every evening? Enter your email below to start!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

For security, use of Google's reCAPTCHA service is required which is subject to the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

I agree to these terms.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.