By Harry King
NASHVILLE — Nobody shed any tears when Arkansas’ basketball season ended Thursday night.
Not the players, not the fans and certainly not the media.
Enough is enough. Sayonara to a so-so season. The 77-64 loss to Georgia was the Razorbacks’ sixth straight and the five previous ran the gamut from a listless effort against LSU to frittering away a double-digit lead late against Mississippi in Fayetteville.
Thank goodness spring football begins in less than three weeks.
For Arkansas fans in the doldrums, there will be new opportunities to root for No. 15, No. 33 and No. 4. Instead of Rotnei Clarke, Marshawn Powell and Courtney Fortson, those numbers will belong to Ryan Mallett, Dennis Johnson and Jarius Wright.
The period to the basketball season was mostly the result of the inside work of Georgia’s Trey Thompkins and Travis Leslie. Thompkins looks the part at 6-foot-10; Leslie is only 6-foot-4. Between them, they scored 44. Thompkins also had 14 rebounds, half as many as the entire Arkansas team, and his production was part of 19 second-chance points.
Arkansas’ last lead was 4-2, unless you count the 78-69 that was on the overhead clock prior to the tip. It was a carryover from Florida-Auburn, but the clock operator had changed the teams to reflect the Razorback game.
The Razorbacks had opportunities galore to catch the Bulldogs. Most of the time, Thompkins or Leslie had an answer.
The outcome is just one more example of the fact that every college basketball game is a fresh 40 minutes. This is the same Georgia team that led Arkansas in Athens by 15 points and lost by 72-68. That night, Arkansas scored 22 in the first half and trailed by 15, but outscored Georgia 26-8 when the Bulldogs made only two field goals in the first 10 minutes of the second half.
In Athens, Fortson made 7-of-12 field goals and 12-of-16 free throws and scored 27. On Thursday night, he was 6-of-13, including an awful miss from outside when he tried to draw a foul, and only shot five free throws on his way to 16 points.
Considering the late tip — scheduled for 8:45, it started at 9:01 — those of us on deadline hoped for a definitive moment in the first half.
No such luck. Georgia led by as much as 10, but it was 25-24 when before Fortson and Clarke missed 3-point attempts. Ricky McPhee’s long 3 at the buzzer was good for 40-32 lead.
At that point, the seatmate who decided his story would be strictly about the second half seemed very wise.
Michael Washington got the roll on a free throw and swished the second that narrowed the Georgia lead to 52-49 and a clump of Arkansas fans in Section 113 rose to their feet. Thompkins countered with two of his own.
At 64-59, he finished a three-point play.
Even then, there was trepidation about reading too much into a tidy lead. Hardly any margin is secure. Twenty-four hours earlier, Montana rallied from 22 down to beat Weber State in the finals of the Big Sky Tournament. Earlier Thursday in the SEC Tournament, Alabama beat South Carolina after trailing by 18.
Leslie scored inside for 70-61 and then took a pass from Thompkins for an 11-point lead — enough to proceed with this column about the end of the Razorback season. The one about a UA comeback fell victim to the delete key.
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Harry King is sports columnist for Stephens Media’s Arkansas News Bureau. His e-mail address is hking@arkansasnews.com.
