LOUISVILLE, Ky. – December 4, 2024 – Dana Brown
University of Louisville men’s basketball suffered an 86-63 loss to No. 23/20 Ole Miss on Tuesday night at the KFC Yum! Center in SEC/ACC Men’s Basketball Challenge.
“Ole Miss was really good tonight, they’re a very good team,” said Louisville head coach Pat Kelsey. “They’re well-coached, they’re tough, they’re deep, they’re physical and scored the ball way too easy. But you’ve got to give them a lot of credit, they took it to us. I thought our defense was really good down in the Bahamas and it wasn’t to our standard tonight. Early on in the game, I felt like we had quite a few open looks that didn’t go down and I felt like we allowed our offense to affect our defense a little bit. In the Bahamas, we were a little sluggish early on in several of those games and we just kept guarding and I didn’t think we did that as well tonight. No rest for the weary… tough loss tonight. Give them credit, tip your cap, they kicked our butt. We dust ourself off, we show up tomorrow, we get back to work against obviously a really good opponent on Sunday.”
Ole Miss opened the contest with the hot hand, making seven of its first nine attempts. Louisville went through a field goal drought of four minutes in that time – the drought was resolved by a James Scott dunk just before the 13-minute mark.
The Revels used a 6-0 run to extend their lead to 23-11 with just over nine minutes remaining in the first half. The Cards scored four straight quick between 5:52 and 5:16 to cut the Ole Miss lead to just eight points.
At halftime, Ole Miss led 40-31.
Two minutes into the second half, the Cardinals were able to cut the Rebel lead to just five points, but Ole Miss quickly responded with a 7-0 run in just 36 seconds to extend its advantage back to 47-39.
Louisville never came closer than 11 points as the Rebels pushed their lead as high as 27 points with a 18-7 run between 8:47 and 4:43. Ultimately, the Cardinals were defeated 86-63.
Ole Miss shot 63.6% from the field in the second half and 56.7% overall. The Rebels lead the country in turnovers per game and put that on display Tuesday evening with just eight miscues the entire game.
Louisville was led in scoring by Chucky Hepburn who had 19 points and four assists. He made seven of nine attempts at the charity stripe.
Former Cardinal Dre Davis was the Rebels’ leading scorer with 20 points on 9-12 shooting.
The Cardinals will open ACC play on Sunday with a matchup against No. 9 Duke at 6 p.m. in the KFC Yum! Center. The game will be broadcast on ACC Network.
