With Texas A&M’s NCAA Tournament hopes starting to get more in doubt in recent weeks, the Aggies notched a major win to help solidify their March Madness resume as they took down the Kentucky Wildcats 96-85 on Tuesday night at Reed Arena.
After some ice cold shooting early, the Aggies found themselves down 31-18 with 7:30 to go in the first half. It felt very much like the stagnant team we’d seen to many times in recent weeks. But the resurgent
long-range shooting of Ruben Dominguez sparked the Aggies to a 27-3 run to end the half, building a 12-point lead from which they’d never look back. In total, Dominguez shot 5-of-8 from long distance, making as many threes has he had in the past five games combined, and it helped spark the A&M offense, which also saw Rylan Griffen go 4-of-8 on threes and Zach Clemence go 3-of-6. When they’re hitting like that from the outside, this is a very difficult team to beat.
With the win, the Aggies move to 10-7 in SEC play, and are in a tie for 5th place in the conference standings. But more importantly, they get another Quad 1 win to bolster their NCAA Tournament resume. Heading into tonight, ESPN’s Joe Lunardi had the Aggies as the last team getting a bye into the tournament (meaning the last at-large team who doesn’t have to play in a play-in game), and the consensus was the Aggies needed to win their final two games against Kentucky and LSU to feeling secure in making the field. The larger of those two hurdles just got cleared, and now A&M will end the regular season with a road trip to Baton Rouge to face a team who is currently at the bottom of the SEC standings. That game will tip off at 5 p.m. on Saturday and air on SEC Network.
While there is still work to be done, this team is now tantalizingly close to going dancing in Bucky McMillan’s first season in Aggieland, and just as importantly, looked more like team capable of doing so than they have in several weeks.
