By Robert Wilson
It has been 64 years since a Southern Miss men’s basketball player did what Tylik Weeks did Thursday night in the Sun Belt Conference Tournament.
The 6-foot-7 junior forward and Southwest Mississippi Community College transfer from New York City scored 31 points to lead No. 8 seed Southern Miss to a 86-80 victory over No. 9 seed James Madison in the third round of the tournament in Pensacola.
Not since Southern Miss legend Nick Devon scored 35 points in the Gulf States Conference Tournament Feb. 29, 1952 has a player scored that many points.
Southern Miss improved to 17-15 and meets No. 5 seed Texas State Friday at 5 p.m. Central in a fourth-round game. The teams split in the regular season series with Southern Miss winning 80-70 in overtime Jan. 8 in Hattiesburg and Texas State winning 74-67 in Texas nine days later.
Weeks – who scored in double figures for the 29th time this season and scored at least 30 points for the third time this season – made 8 of 16 shots from the field, 2 of 2 from 3-point range, and 13 of 15 shots from the free throw line, along with 5 rebounds, 3 assists, 1 steal and 0 turnovers Thursday against James Madison.
Weeks must like the rims at Pensacola Bay Center. He scored 37 points in a 92-83 victory over North Florida in the Pensacola Invitational in November. He made 15 of 23 shots from the field and 7 of 8 from the free throw line with 6 rebounds, 2 assists, 1 steal and only 1 turnover.
He is averaging a team-high 19.2 points and is second on the team with 74 assists after Thursday’s performance.
Weeks averaged 21 points, 8.3 rebounds and 5.5 assists in 29 games, was named All-Region 23 and first team All-State and finished his career with 1,128 points – the most in school history – at Southwest Mississippi CC. He averaged 17.2 points, 8.2 rebounds, and 2.1 assists as a freshman
Weeks averaged 7.7 points and 7.3 rebounds as a senior for Brooklyn Theater Arts High in Brooklyn, New York.
In addition to Weeks having no turnovers against James Madison, the Southern Miss team had only six turnovers, the fewest committed this season and the third-fewest by a Jay Ladner coached team over the last seven seasons.
Isaac Taveras had 17 points and Djahi Binet had 11 points.
“I was proud of our team’s preparation all week,” Ladner said. “We had a lot of attention to detail. It was a really, really tough draw for us. I was proud of our team. They have a lot of scrap in them. They have a lot of pride about themselves. In our starting five, we have one player who played at Alcorn State last year (Binet), two junior college players (Weeks and Taveras), a NAIA player who transferred to us (Dylan Brumfield from William Carey) and a Division II player (Izzy Hart). We talked to them a lot throughout the year that God put us together for a crazy reason. If you would have rewound their lives back 12 months ago that we had all known we would have been together as a group, nobody would have believed it. We are all together for a reason. We want to make the most of the remaining time we have together. The life of a basketball team is very short, even shorter in this day and time with the climate of Division I basketball. We have a lot of underdogs on our team. We have 14 junior college players on our team and I was a junior college player at one time. They have a mentality there that’s a little bit different. We’ve got a lot of guys who are fighting and scraping and coming from the grassroots. That’s kind of who Southern Miss is. We are a blue collar university and we pride ourselves in that. Our president talks about Southern Miss grit. We try to get our players to buy into that mentality. It’s a tradition that Southern Miss has in athletics. Our president, Joe Paul, says we punch above our weight. That’s why the structure of our roster changed a lot this year. In the past, we’ve been chasing high majors, guys in the portal. We changed that and went for guys who were, first of all, good people that would be good representatives of the university, diplomats and good representatives of our basketball program. We’ve got a good, good group of young men. Secondly, we wanted some guys who had a little dog about them, a little toughness. And junior college players a lot of times bring that. Guys had to check certain boxes in our recruiting. It’s been one of the most enjoyable years I’ve ever had coaching.”
Southern Miss went through a tough stretch when Taveras, a 6-6 guard transfer from South Plains, Texas, Community College, was out with broken hand for nine weeks. He is Southern Miss’ second leading scorer at 15.1 points per game.
Southern Miss had a 5-7 record without Taveras, but has won five of its last seven games with him in the lineup.
“I’m proud of our team for how they played for the nine weeks that Issac was hurt,” Ladner said. “We could have used that as an excuse or the team got divided. Our team actually came together. I love the way our team grew during the time. It was unfortunate to lose a player of his caliber for that long. The guys who took Isaac’s minutes grew during that time. We have a lot of experience and depth on our bench.”
