Baylor Defeats Cincinnati in Big 12 Tournament Quarterfinal
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Baylor overcame a slow start to defeat Cincinnati, 68-56, in the quarterfinals of the Big 12 Men’s Basketball Tournament at T-Mobile Center on Thursday.
Baylor (23-9) will move on to face No. 2 seed Iowa State at 8:30 p.m. Friday for the right to advance to the Big 12 Championship Game.
Cincinnati (20-14) was eliminated from the tournament and will wait to see if the advance to the NCAA Tournament or the NIT on Sunday.
The Bears had to get their stars out of a first-half slump to win this one, and they did, building as much as a 14-point lead in the second half, only to see it shrink to four before they went on to claim the victory.
Baylor’s top three scorers — RayJ Dennis, Ja’Kobe Walter and Jalen Bridges — failed to make a field goal in the first half. All three had a basket by the 15:10 mark of the second half and Baylor had a 35-31 lead as they outscored the Bearcats 11-5.
The Bears only got hotter. By the 11:30 mark of the second half, the Bears were up 47-33, had made eight straight field goals and were on a 12-2 run. The Bearcats were shooting 3-of-12 from the field in the first 8:30 and took a time out to try and reset the game.
It helped. The Bearcats answered with a 10-0 run — a Skillings lay-up, a Jizzle James layup, a Jamille Reynolds three-point play and a John Newman III 3-pointer — to force Baylor to take a time out up only 47-43 with 9:08 left.
The Bearcats made 7-of-8 field goals to cut the lead to four again, 53-49, before Baylor got out of a shooting rut with a Bridges jumper with 5:21 left.
It was Walter who gave Baylor a little breathing room with a 3-pointer with less than four minutes to play, pushing the Bears’ lead to seven points. After Skillings missed a pair of free throws after the under-4 time out, Dennis’ lay-up pushed the lead to nine. The Bearcats never got the game back to a single possession.
Dennis ended up with 13 points to lead Baylor, with Bridges and Yves Missi scoring 12 each and Walter adding 11. Skillings led Cincinnati with 15, while Newman and James had 12 each.
The Bearcats and Bears had not met since mid-January, when Baylor slipped by Cincinnati at Foster Pavilion in Waco, Texas. Entering Thursday’s game the Bears were coming off five days of rest and Cincinnati was playing its third game in three days, the only team from Tuesday’s first round to make it to Thursday’s action.
For the first 10 minutes, they played like the team that had the rest, as the Bearcats, led by Skillings, starting the game on a 12-3 run. Skillings had nine first-half points and led all scorers at the break.
But the Bears rallied back behind forward Caleb Lohner, who drew an intentional foul, made both free throws and then poured in a lay-up with nine minutes left to cap a 9-0 run and tie the game at 12-12.
From there, the game went back and forth with Cincinnati taking the lead late in the first half on a jumper by James. A turnover by Dennis ensured that the Bearcats would have the first-half lead.
You can find Matthew Postins on Twitter @PostinsPostcard.
