The East Texas A&M men’s basketball team is picked to finish dead last in the Southland Conference this season.
The voters might want to rethink that assessment after Monday night’s season opener, as the Lions shocked the mighty SEC‘s Oklahoma Sooners, 68-64, to mark one of the sport’s most surprising results in decades. The Lions were 29-point underdogs at the Lloyd Noble Center in Norman, Oklahoma, but they walked away with the biggest win in program history.
“We had guys step up and make big-time plays down the stretch,” East Texas A&M coach Jaret von Rosenberg said in a postgame interview. “It was far from perfect. But when you play defense like we did in the first half and hold somebody to 29 percent, that gives you a chance obviously to win. …It’s exciting, because that’s not the best this team can play.”
The Lions’ win stands as the second-largest upset in more than 100,000 NCAA Division I games over the past three decades, per ESPN. Only Eastern Illinois’ upset of 30.5-point favorite Iowa in 2022 was seen as less likely by oddsmakers over that span. The Lions didn’t dominate statistically, but they did outshoot the Sooners from three-point range, 41 to 25 percent.
