Ole Miss Men’s Basketball Takes on South Carolina in the SEC Tournament

By Adam Brown
Sports Editor
adam.brown@hottytoddy.com

Ole Miss men’s basketball team heads to the Music City of Nashville Tennessee to take on the South Carolina Gamecocks in the SEC Tournament on Wednesday. The tipoff is set for 6 p.m. and can be seen on the SEC Network.

Ole Miss (11-20, 3-15 SEC) closed out the regular season with a tough 82-77 loss on the road to the Missouri Tigers.

This season, the Rebels are led on the floor by Matthew Murrell who averages 14.9 points per game. His teammate, Jaemyn Brakefeild with 10.9 ppg.

As a team, Ole Miss scores 67.9 points per night.

South Carolina finished the 2022-23 regular season with an identical overall record to Ole Miss at 11-20, but went 4-14 to finish one place above the Rebels in 12th. The Gamecocks closed out their regular season after the February 11th matchup with the Rebels going 2-4, falling to Vanderbilt before defeating LSU on February 18th. They then hosted No. 2 Alabama and took them to overtime before falling by two, dropping games to No. 11 Tennessee and Mississippi State, before closing out their schedule with a win against Georgia.

The team’s leading scorer has been freshman GG Jackson, who averages 15.1 points per game and ranks ninth in the conference. The offense has ran through Jackson all season, as he finished the year leading the SEC in field goals attempted, putting up 441 shots.

As a team, South Carolina ranks in the top-100 nationally in offensive rebounds per game (No. 39, 11.9 per game), and three-point attempts per game (No. 86, 23.7 per game).

Wednesday will be the third time this season that the Rebels and the Gamecocks have met on the hardwood. Ole Miss took the first game in Columbia, S.C. 70-58 before South Carolina won 64-61 in Oxford. This will be the 47th overall meeting between the two programs, as Ole Miss holds a slight edge 24-22, including a 6-4 advantage over the last 10 meetings.

The two teams have matched up 10 times in the SEC Tournament, with South Carolina taking the first two games in 1994 and 1998, before the Rebels won by four during the 1999 SEC Tournament. After the Gamecocks knocked the Rebels out in the 2002 tournament, Ole Miss won the next three postseason matchups in 2003, 2005, and 2011. USC took down Ole Miss during the SEC Tournament in 2015 and 2018, with their last matchup coming in 2021, when the Rebels won 76-59.