DENVER — Pharrel Payne had a career-high 25 points and grabbed 10 rebounds, Wade Taylor IV had 16 points, and No. 4 seed Texas A&M beat No. 13 seed Yale 80-71 in the first round of the South Region on Thursday night.
Jace Carter added 10 points for the Aggies (23-10), who will face No. 5 Michigan in the second round on Saturday night. The Wolverines beat UC San Diego 68-65 in the first round.
John Poulakidas scored 23 points, Nick Townsend had 15, Isaac Celiscar finished with 12 points and Casey Simmons contributed 11 points for the Bulldogs.
Yale (22-8) could not duplicate its 2024 first-round upset of a fourth-seeded SEC team. The Bulldogs beat Auburn, 78-76, in last year’s tournament.
“We got in a little foul trouble,” Yale coach James Jones said about his team’s defense on Payne. “Samson Aletan ended up playing 15 minutes in the game. We just didn’t have the size, the matchup against him inside. Didn’t take us by surprise. We didn’t think that Samson was going to be limited to 15 minutes. The young man had a great game.”
Yale got some momentum behind Poulakidas early in the second half. The Bulldog trailed 51-40 when Poulakidas hit a jumper to cut the lead to single digits. Then, Townsend stole Manny Obaseki’s pass. Townsend went up for a layup, but Obaseki recovered to block it. Solomon Washington threw the loose ball out of bounds off Bez Mbeng.
The Aggies went ahead by 12 but Riley Fox made a pair of 3-pointers and Townsend a short hook to pull Yale within 58-52 with 8:36 remaining.
Taylor missed a jumper out of a timeout, giving the Bulldogs a chance to cut deeper into the deficit, but Townsend missed a baseline jumper. Carter hit a 3-pointer and a putback layup, Payne tipped in a miss and Taylor hit two free throws to make it 67-52, and Texas A&M closed it out.
“I would say my mindset before was just to be aggressive,” Payne said. “My inside game was working for me all night.”
The Aggies wound up outrebounding the Bulldogs 21-14 in the second half and 37-29 for the game.
“We knew that they were big on the glass, a great offensive rebounding team,” said Mbeng. “We put a big emphasis on that coming into the game. We did a good job, credit to our team, on that in the first half. In the second half, we had some foul trouble going on. I feel like that was the big piece of that.”
The Aggies used a 13-2 run early in the game to take control. Yale made one field goal in nearly six minutes, which allowed Texas A&M to take a double-digit lead.
The Bulldogs trimmed the deficit to five on two free throws by Poulakidas with 3:20 left in the first but the Aggies closed strong, with Taylor’s late 3-pointer putting them ahead 40-29 at the break.
“We played pretty well in the first half,” said Taylor. “We still had a couple things we could have cleaned up, which we tried to do in the second half. Ultimately we played to the game plan, and I think we executed it pretty well.”
–Michael Kelly, Field Level Media
