Aztecs Improve to 2-0 in WAC, Beat Air Force

A good shot, a basketball sage once said, is one that goes in the basket.

To find the proof, one needed to look no further than the reactions of Tony Ross and Raymond Dudley after San Diego State scored a 64-61 comeback victory in front of 4,951 at the San Diego Sports Arena.

Ross and Dudley are two of the Western Athletic Conference’s best 3-point shooters. And Saturday night, they faced off in a shooter’s match.

Both took their wild shots, their ill-advised shots, their farther-than-the-eye-can-see shots. And in the end, both took their team’s most important shot.

From the final score, the rest is easy to guess. Ross swished his final 3-pointer of the night--a 23-footer at the top of the key, just beyond the NBA line, with 54 seconds left.

“I thought it was off,” Ross said, “but it found its way through the hoop. . . . I really didn’t know where I was, I just shot.”

The 3-pointer was the last of Ross’ team-high 20 points and gave the Aztecs the lead for good at 61-59.

The ball and the game then passed to Dudley’s hands. But his off-balanced, 3-point try with 28 seconds left failed, and SDSU center Mitch McMullen rebounded.

The Aztecs added three free throws--including the winning 1-and-1 by Bryan Williams with 16 seconds remaining--for their final points. Senior forward Chad Kimble scored Air Force’s last basket on a layin with six seconds left after Dudley missed another 3-pointer seconds earlier.

The victory was the Aztecs fourth in their past five games and raised their record to 8-4, 2-0 in the WAC. It is their best 12-game start since the 1984-85 team opened at 10-2 and 2-0.

It was Air Force’s third loss in a row after an 8-2 start and their second in two WAC games.

Dudley’s two late misses overshadowed a 17-point second half in which he made 7 of 10 shots to rally the Falcons from an early 9-point deficit. He finished with a game-high 24 points.

But he could not get over his next-to-last 3-point attempt, which came while he was closely guarded by Williams and with 23 seconds left on the 45-second clock.

“Now that I look back on it, it was a bad shot,” Dudley said. “I shouldn’t have taken it. He was hanging on me. I don’t know; I just felt I could make it. It hurt us. It cost us the game.”

The miss ended what had been a game-long shooting matchup between Ross and Dudley.

“When he starts making his shots, I felt I could do the same,” Ross said. “That does get me fired up.”

Ross made 6 of 12 shots, including 5 of 11 from 3-point range. He also played a season-high 31 minutes after being brought off the bench early to give the listless Aztecs a boost.

The Aztecs began as if they, not the Falcons, were they ones who had lost in double-overtime at Hawaii two nights before and then spent most of the next day traveling to San Diego. The Aztecs turned the ball over twice and missed their first three shots as Air Force took a 7-0 lead.

The early play had SDSU Coach Jim Brandenburg so distressed that he called his earliest timeout of the season, just 1:34 into the game, in an effort to shake things up.

McMullen broke the scoreless streak with a layin at 17:13, but the Falcons continued to confound the Aztecs, taking a 20-9 lead at 10:31.

Then, finally, the Aztecs woke up, thanks to insertion of forward Sam Johnson and the shooting of Ross.

Johnson, who missed starting for the first time because of a sprained left ankle, entered the game at 10:50. By the time he left with 1:01 left in the half, the Aztecs had taken a 34-29 lead on the way to a 36-29 halftime edge.

Johnson had seven of his eight points in the half and was perfect on his three shots from the field and one free-throw attempt.

“Word came down the bench that maybe he could contribute some,” Brandenburg said. “If we looked like handle them, he would not have stepped on the floor.”

Dudley had only seven points at the half. He missed 7 of 8 shots from the field, including 4 of 5 3-pointers as he was hounded mainly by the man-to-man defense of Williams. But Dudley would not be kept silent for long.

He opened the second half with a scoring burst worthy of his conference-leading 26.8-point average. He scored 9 points in the first 5:05 of the second as the Falcons stormed back to take a 44-43 lead. It was their first lead since a 26-24 edge with 4 minutes left in the first half.

The rally came with McMullen and guard Michael Best on the bench, nursing four personal fouls. Best eventually would foul out with 6:09 to play.

The game went back and forth the rest of the way, as no team was able to take more than a 3-point lead until Williams’ made his 1-and-1 with 16 seconds left.