Saturday, February 3, The Wyoming Cowboys basketball team (15-7), took on conference rivals, the Fresno State Bulldogs (15-8), in the Arena Auditorium.
The Bulldogs were able to get out to a quick lead, 5 minutes into the game the score was 12-7 in their favor. This came after a combination of 2 offensive rebounds and 2 made three pointers from Fresno State.
Things didn’t get much better for the Pokes in the ensuing 5 minutes. The Bulldogs went on an 8-0 run before Nyaires Redding was able to snap that with a three. The score with 10 minutes left in the half was 22-10.
While the Cowboy offense was able to somewhat pick up their game the defense continued to struggle. With only 5 minutes left in the half the score was 34-16 in favor of the Bulldogs.
The Pokes began to heat up in the last part of the half and where able to cut the lead of Fresno State to only 13, after Alan Herndon hit a 3, then Cody Kelley got a steal and was able to lay in the fast break. Unfortunately for the Cowboys they were not able to maintain that tempo and the score going into half was 46-30.
Herndon and Hayden Dalton lead the Pokes in scoring at the half with 9 each, Dalton also had 7 rebounds. Jaron Hopkins led Fresno in scoring with 10.
The second half started off pretty evenly matched, 4 minutes into the half and the Bulldog lead stayed at 16 with a score of 34-50.
The Pokes got their first offensive rebound of the night at a time of 13:15 by Hunter Maldonado. As the time crept down to only 10 minutes remaining in the game the Fresno state lead still remained fairly stagnant, with the score being 64-47.
Some rough play from the Bulldogs was met with harsh jeers by Cowboy fans. However, this did not seem to impact Fresno State as they maintained a solid 15 point lead with 5 minutes remaining in the game.
As the game concluded, Wyoming turned to hurry up basketball, but to no avail. The final score of the game was 80-62, with Fresno in the lead. Wyoming head coach said about the loss. “I give Coach [Rodney] Terry (Fresno State head coach.) and his guys a tremendous amount of Credit.”
Dalton finished as the leading scorer for the Pokes with 20 he also led in rebounds with 11. The Pokes next game will be Wednesday, Feb. 7, in the Arena Auditorium against Utah State.
