Bears take step back with lopsided defeat to Texas State

BOX SCORE: at Texas State

SAN MARCOS, Texas -- Northern Colorado’s men’s basketball team had played two straight games to overtime before coming into its game at Texas State on Tuesday night.

The Bears did not make it a third.

Not by any stretch of the imagination.

The Bobcats won 82-59 -- a little more than a month after Northern Colorado defeated them 105-93 in Greeley. But that doesn’t tell just how quick Texas State jumped on the Bears in this one, or just how quickly Northern Colorado (5-11, 1-2 Big Sky Conference) let this in-season rematch get away.

The Bobcats (7-6) were ahead 9-0 before most in attendance at Strahan Coliseum had even found their seats, and they later led 26-8 less than two minutes after the first media timeout.

To put that in perspective: Northern Colorado surrendered just 28 points in the entire first half against Idaho State last Thursday. And this: Northern Colorado led 47-30 at half when these teams played previously this season.

“We didn’t compete tonight,” Bears head coach Tad Boyle said. “We were soft, we were outhustled and they wanted it more than us. It was an embarrassment tonight to college basketball. We’ve gotten off to slow starts before, but we’ve never been like we were tonight. There was no life, no leadership, no toughness, no competitiveness, no pride. And to me, that’s unacceptable.”

There was some good news.

Devon Beitzel finished the night with 15 points (his second straight solid scoring game after ending a historic run with two points against the Bengals last week), and Chris Kaba matched him with a career-high night.

Mike Proctor, after struggling a bit the last three games, added 13 points and eight rebounds.

Other than that, there wasn’t a lot to take from this one.

The loss was the Bears’ worst defeat since falling 89-66 at Montana State in February 2007, their 15 turnovers in the first half were a season high for turnovers in any half, and their 16 missed free throws in the game were the most they’ve missed in a game all season.

“You can look at this one any way you want,” Boyle said. “We were just bad tonight. And I’m concerned because we haven’t had a lot of good practice opportunities lately. The good thing is, with our schedule (the Bears don’t play again until hosting Sacramento State next Tuesday night at Butler-Hancock), we’re going to get to travel back to Greeley, and we don’t have classes again until next week. We’ve got Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. That’s four days. We’re going to get better.”

POSTGAME NOTES: Boyle was able to use his University of Kansas connections to get the Bears a practice session on Monday afternoon at the San Antonio Spurs’ facility. Boyle played at Kansas while R.C. Buford (Spurs general manager) was a student assistant for coach Larry Brown… John Pena, Will Figures, Beitzel, Neal Kingman and Jabril Banks started for the fourth straight game… Kingman, and Figures were replaced by Beitzel and Bonner to start the second half… Kingman left the game in the first minute with an illness… Texas State never led in the teams’ first meeting this year… The Bears got three blocks in the game, tying their season high.