Three takeaways for Murray State in 65-49 loss to Wright State

The Wright State Raiders picked up their third straight victory in a 65-49 win over Murray State. It was the Racers' fifth straight loss.

"The league is an amazing league, like any other conference. And I feel a lot better at 6-7 than I did at 3-7," said WSU Head Coach Billy Donlon.

With that, here's three quick things to note about Murray State's performance.

1. No inside presence on offense, largely because no Wayne Langston

There was no inside game to speak of for the visiting Racers on this night. Langston picked up his second foul before five minutes of gameplay, and a quick whistle nagged him all night. Because of these quick foul calls in the first and second half, Langston only played 23 minutes and contributed just 6 points while attempting just 2 shots. Jeffery Moss didn't get going until the second half, and even then his buckets mostly did not come in the paint. Moss finished with 12 points.

"I thought Wright State did a nice job in their execution of getting him (Karena) inside touches," said Murray State Head Coach Matt Mcmahon. "Yoho puts you in some difficult positions because he's so skilled on the block with his catch-and- face game but he can also pick-and-pop and knock down three's and he hit a big one when we had gotten ourselves back in the game."

In the same breath, the defensive end hurt even more than the bigs struggling on offense. The big duo of JT Yoho and Michael Karena combined to score 37 points. Karena came in averaging 7.5 points per game but finished with 18.

2. The Triples weren't there

Oy. Murray State was already only making 3-pointers at a 31.9 percent clip coming in. The Racers really needed to hit from beyond the arc to spread out the compact Raiders' defense but were never able to do so. Murray State went 4-21 from behind the arc, which included a frigid 1-12 in the first half. Moss hit two to start the second half, but it wasn't near enough to give the Racers the space they needed to open up the offense. Point guard Bryce Jones scored just 8 points on 3-11 shooting, which included an 0-4 night from beyond the arc.

3. Gave up big runs/didn't score over long periods of time

The Racers struggled to score over the last eight minutes of the first half, putting up just 6 points over the final eight minutes of the first half. Murray State put together a nice run of its own in the second half to pull within one at 40-39, but after that found the rim to resemble something similar to concrete.  The Raiders went on a 21-5 run over eight minutes of game play from there to put the game out of reach.