No. 23 Ole Miss seeking first SEC road win at Arkansas

After drastically different results in their league openers, No. 23 Ole Miss and Arkansas meet Wednesday night in a Southeastern Conference contest in Fayetteville, Ark.The Rebels (12-2, 1-0 SEC) moved up one spot in this week’s Associated Press poll following Saturday’s 63-51 home win against Georgia.As it did in several previous games, head coach Chris Beard’s squad started slowly, trailing 28-26 at the half before stepping it up after the intermission.Defense was key as the Rebels limited the visiting Bulldogs to just 29.3 percent shooting overall (17 of 58) and 11.1 percent from 3-point range (2 of 18). Mississippi collected 10 steals and 10 blocks.Matthew Murrell and Jaemyn Brakefield scored 15 points apiece to lead the Rebels.”The second half was pretty clean basketball,” Beard said. “You beat them by 14, we scored 37 and held the ball late. We didn’t have any special performances tonight. … We just played really hard as a team and played some great defense.”Sean Pedulla paces Ole Miss with 14.1 points per game followed by Jaylen Murray (12.5), Murrell (12.0) and Dre Davis (10.8).Meanwhile, Arkansas head coach John Calipari is looking for his squad to rebound — literally — following Saturday’s 76-52 setback at No. 1 Tennessee.Arkansas could not do much well on either end of the court against the Volunteers, but Calipari was absolutely astounded by his Hogs’ inability to rebound the basketball in the lopsided contest.”I can’t remember the last time I had a team get beat by 30 rebounds,” said Calipari, though the 52-29 margin was not quite that amount. “And so we’ve got to do some soul-searching. … Aren’t you like, ‘How did you only get beat by (24)?’ It could’ve been 50.”That rhetorical question seemed to nag the Arkansas bench boss, who admitted he probably made a mistake by not having a pre-game shootaround. The Razorbacks finished 6 of 29 from deep (20.7 percent).

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