Texas A&M
DePaul
Texas A&M Women's Basketball
Huskers.com
Courtney Walker shoots over a DePaul defender on Saturday night. Walker finished the game with 25 points.
A&M moves on to Elite Eight with 84-65 win over DePaul
LINCOLN, NE – Three down, three to go.
On Saturday evening, the Texas A&M women’s basketball team won their third game in the 2014 NCAA Tournament and advanced to the program’s third ever Elite Eight with an 84-65 victory over the DePaul Blue Demons in the semifinals of the Lincoln regional.
The Aggies were led by sophomore guard Courtney Walker who scored 25, however all five A&M starters reached double digits.
Huskers.com
Courtney Walker shoots over a DePaul defender on Saturday night. Walker finished the game with 25 points.
From the get-go, A&M looked like the better squad, holding the high-powered offense of DePaul to just four points over the game’s first seven and a half minutes. During that stretch, the Aggies racked up 13 of their own to take a nine point lead with 12:30 remaining in the half.
“As a team, we were really focused, especially on the defensive end,” said A&M sophomore Courtney Williams. “We had a game plan and we followed it.”
The Blue Demons cut the A&M lead back down to five at 26-21 with 5:16 left in the period, but Walker keyed an 8-0 Aggie run with six of her 25 points over the next three and a half minutes to push the A&M advantage back out to 13.
Although she was particularly hard for DePaul to stop in the closing minutes of the first half, Blue Demons’ head coach Doug Bruno said his team struggled with Walker all night.
“She’s a really special player,” Bruno said of Walker. “She’s got the intermediate game. She’s just a really effective scorer.”
In addition to Walker’s stellar play over the final minutes of the first, the A&M bench racked up some quality minutes while the majority of the starters were in foul trouble.
When point guard Jordan Jones picked up her second foul of the half with just under seven minutes remaining, she knew the team was still in good hands in backup point guard Curtyce Knox. During that span, Knox went 2-for-2 from the field to help the Aggies to a 38-24 lead at the break.
“I felt that she came in and had extreme confidence today,” said Jones of her backup. “It feels good knowing that when the starting guard goes out, there is no letdown in defense or offense.”
The Blue Demons were much better from the floor during the second half of play, but their atrocious 28% performance in the first half – much because of A&M’s defense – proved to be too much to overcome for the nation’s third-best scoring offense.
“We got it going, but we got it going too late,” Bruno said. “The rhythm wasn’t there early and we paid a price for that.”
They counted us out in 2011, too. They counted us out when we got to the Final Four. Everybody counted us out. Don’t count Aggies out.
DePaul cut the A&M lead to as few as 10 with 5:32 left on the clock, but A&M’s freshness and depth took its toll late as the Blue Demons appeared to run out of steam. Over the game’s final minutes, A&M rattled off a 16-7 run to secure the 19-point, Sweet Sixteen victory.
“The pace of play favored us because I think I had a little better bench,” said A&M head coach Gary Blair. “The unsung kids contributed off the bench for us.
“In the second half we got the big lead. It was sort of out of my hands, we were kind of breaking it in transition instead of running a play, I just said, ‘Hey let them freelance’. They were feeling it.”
With the win, the Aggies are rewarded a shot against top-seeded and wire-to-wire number one Connecticut in Monday’s regional finals. While a victory seems near impossible, Blair reflected on past experiences to prove that anything can happen.
“They counted us out in 2011, too,” said Blair. “They counted us out when we got to the Final Four. Everybody counted us out.
“Don’t count Aggies out.”
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