Aztecs’ First Loss of Season Ends a Long Week on Road

On a night when little came easy to the San Diego State basketball team, at least words did not fail senior Sam Johnson.

His summation of the Aztecs’ first loss of the season--58-43 to previously winless Texas Tech in front of 4,054 at Lubbock Municipal Coliseum--was short, bitter and to the point.

“They played average; we played lousy,” he said. And Johnson probably was being kind . . . to both teams.

Consider these Texas Tech statistical bits and remember--they are from the winning team.

--The Red Raiders shot 37.5% from the field, including 2-of-10 from 3-point range.

--They had 26 points at halftime and still led by 10.

--They turned the ball over 5 times in the first 4 minutes and did not score their first field goal until Jerry Mason’s 3-point heave just beat the 45-second buzzer.

The Red Raiders (1-3), to give them their due, played like a team that had opened its season with 3 losses and had dropped 8 in a row over 2 seasons.

The problem was that the Aztecs (3-1) played nothing like the team that won its first 3 games for the first time in 4 seasons. Instead, they looked more like a team that was at the end of a weeklong, 3-game journey that had taken them to and from Texas and back again with a game in San Diego in the middle.

The Aztecs will have logged nearly 4,500 air miles, seen the inside of seven airports in four states and taken a round-trip bus ride to Waco from Dallas when this odyssey is over today.

The last leg was to have started this morning with a 5 o’clock wake-up call for an early flight. Chances are, after the way they played in this game and the strong words their coach, Jim Brandenburg, had for them afterward, they did not sleep tight.

“It was one of those nightmares,” Brandenburg said. “I’ve been here before. These types of things happen on the road.”

But this was quite a contrast to the Aztecs’ last visit to Texas last Tuesday when they beat Baylor, 83-58, for their widest margin of victory on the road in 20 years. This time the Aztecs scored their least points since a 55-43 loss to Air Force in 1983-84.

The list of what went wrong is too long to mention, but what happened to guard Tony Ross and center Mitch McMullen should make the point.

Ross, who scored 24 points in a 72-63 victory against Texas Tech last season, missed his first 6 shots from the field and spent the first 15 minutes of the second half on the bench.

“We had our eye on No. 20 (Ross),” Texas Tech Coach Gerald Meyers said. “We knew every time he touched the ball, we had to guard him.”

The Red Raiders did the same to McMullen, but used two players to do the job, double-teaming him down low.

McMullen, who was coming off a career-high 29 points against UC Irvine Friday, was held to 6 points on 3-of-13 shooting.