Miners Host Surging Marshall On Senior Night Tonight
UTEP (21-8, 9-5 C-USA) plays its final home game of the regular season on Wednesday against surging Marshall (20-9, 8-6 C-USA). The Herd has won five straight games and seven of nine and has emerged victorious in its last two road contests, at East Carolina on Feb. 12 (78-65) and at Tulane on Feb. 19 (79-75 in overtime).
The Miners are tied for second place in the C-USA standings with Memphis, Southern Miss and Tulsa with two games remaining in the regular season. UAB leads the pack, a game up on the Miners with a 10-4 mark. Marshall is tied with sixth place with SMU. UTEP will face the Mustangs on Saturday afternoon in Dallas before hosting the C-USA Tournament March 9-12.
Eight Miner seniors will be honored at Wednesday’s game — Claude Britten, Randy Culpepper, Isaac Gordon, Eric Munoz, Christian Polk, Wayne Portalatin, Julyan Stone and Jeremy Williams. This year’s senior class ties the second-largest in school history with the 2005-06 squad.
UTEP has won its final home game of the regular season in six of the last seven years, the exception being a 78-67 loss to sixth-ranked Memphis on March 1, 2007.
The Miners are 16-2 at home this season and with a victory would have 17 wins in the Haskins Center for the first time since the 1991-92 campaign, when they finished 17-1 in the venue.
Junior guard Damier Pitts scored 19 points as Marshall topped SMU, 64-62, on Saturday at the Cam Henderson Center. Marshall hasn’t lost since Feb. 9, when it was upended by UAB, 64-48, in Huntington.
The Herd is 6-6 on the road this season, including 3-4 in league play with wins at Houston (63-62), East Carolina and Tulane.
Freshman guard DeAndre Kane leads the team in scoring with 15.1 points per game, followed by Pitts (15.5 ppg) and senior forward Tirrell Baines (12.4 ppg). Marshall is first in C-USA in three-point field goal percentage defense (.289), and third in scoring offense (73.0 ppg), field goal percentage (.456), field goal percentage defense (.410) and rebound margin (+4.4 avg.). Kane is the highest-scoring freshman in the league, and junior swingman Dago Pena ranks second in C-USA in three-point percentage (.438).
UTEP leads the series 5-1 and is 2-0 versus the Herd at the Don Haskins Center with wins during the 2006-07 (88-64) and 2008-09 (74-67) seasons. The Miners are 5-0 versus the Herd since joining C-USA, the only team they haven’t lost to since joining the league. The Miners did lose their first-ever matchup with Marshall, 64-62, on Dec. 8, 1972 at the Bayou Classic in Lafayette, La.
UTEP’s Tim Floyd is 0-1 against Marshall with a 65-58 loss in the Hawaii Early Season Tournament on Dec. 11, 1987 — his second season as a collegiate head coach at Idaho. Floyd has never coached against Marshall’s Tom Herrion.
Source: UTEP Athletics
