CONWAY – Kevin Easley came off the bench to score 18 points against Southern Mississippi, but the hot-shooting Eagles defeated the Chants 79-63 Wednesday night at the HTC Center.
Easley's 18 points were the most points he had scored since the opening game of the season when he scored 20 points in the win over Piedmont. Easley scored his points on seven-of-12 shooting and added a three-point field goal and hit three of his four free throws.
The Eagles came out shooting the ball extremely well in the opening half connecting on 51.5 percent of its field goals and wound up finishing the game shooting 48.2 percent from the field in moving to 12-8 overall and 6-2 in conference action.
USM entered the game averaging 6.3 three-point field goals per game, but exploded for 13 threes in its 29 attempts for 44.8 percent.
Southern Miss led 44-26 at halftime, but the Chants would not go away quietly and started the second half on a 14-point scoring run and cut the lead to 53-48 with 10:24 left in the game. From there the Eagles scored eight consecutive points to push the lead back out to 61-48 and the Chants could not close the gap.
Freshman
Jacob Meyer finished the game with 14 points and eight rebounds, while
John Ojiako, who got into early foul trouble, finished with 10 points and came up one rebound short of picking up his 12th double-double of the season.
Donovan Ivory scored a game-high 28 points for the Eagles and Cobie Montgomery had 11 points and Jeffery Armstrong game off the bench to finish with 10 points.
The Chants shot 53.3 percent in the second half and finished the game shooting 46.6 percent, but three-point shooting (26.7 percent) and free throw shooting (45.5 percent) hurt the Chants as its record stands at 5-14 overall and 2-6 in Sun Belt Conference action.
The Chants will be back in action as they host Georgia State on Saturday, Jan. 27 at 2 p.m. ET.
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