The Bulldogs season ended with a loss to Liberty in the NCAA Tournament.
SAN JOSE, Calif. – Lamar Peters had a practice jersey wrapped around his neck. He leaned back in the corner of Mississippi State's locker room at the SAP Center in San Jose, California.
He looked as comfortable as he could, and he looked confident, too. His Bulldogs were set to take on Liberty in the first round of the NCAA Tournament roughly 24 hours from the time he sat there and said he felt Mississippi State was ready to turn some heads.
Friday evening against the No. 12 seed Liberty Flames, Peters turned plenty of them as he scored 21 points and made four 3-pointers.
But the Flames turned more.
Liberty beat the fifth-seeded Bulldogs, 80-76, to oust them from the tournament much sooner than they would have liked. Mississippi State's season ended abruptly after blowing a double-digit lead down the stretch.
"It's just a tough, tough pill to swallow, especially the way we had the lead that late in the game," MSU head coach Ben Howland said.
Two of the three best players on the floor for either team Friday were Peters and MSU senior guard Quinndary Weatherspoon. The best, though, was probably Liberty red-shirt junior Caleb Homesley, who scored 30 points and led Liberty's comeback.
Homesley caught fire from 3-point range. He made five of his 11 shots from beyond the arc. Three of those came after Mississippi State had built a 10-point lead with roughly seven minutes to go.
"I think I just played confident," Homesley said. "I think any shot i take is going to go in. It just happened that they were falling... It could have been anybody any given night, but tonight it was me."
Before Homesley's assault, the Bulldogs had everything working on both ends of the floor. They racked up eight blocks on the defensive end and wouldn't let Liberty get a good look at the basket. Offensively, Weatherspoon and Peters continued to pace the Bulldogs with a mixture of drives to the bucket and pull-ups from distance.
Weatherspoon scored 27 points on 6-of-12 shooting in his final game in maroon and white. Any time Mississippi State needed a bucket, he drove to the rim and either made a layup or got to the free throw line, where he made 13 of his 16 shots.
"Lamar and I had it going," Weatherspoon said. "I just give the credit to my teammates. I mwan, we all came out and played hard."
They played hard enough to hold a 63-53 lead with 7:11 left in the game. Then they collapsed. Howland said everything that could have went wrong for Mississippi State, well -- went wrong.
Weatherspoon and Peters each picked up four fouls, and it affected Mississippi State's offensive flow. The ball ran through each of those players all night. The duo's mentality drastically changed when they got into foul trouble.
"It made us settle for threes because we didn't want to go out of control and draw a charge," Peters said. "So it made us play timid."
Peters and Weatherspoon couldn't be as aggressive defensively on the perimeter as they had been previously, which allowed Homesley to get good looks from three. He almost single-handily turned the game on its head with 12 points in a four-minute stretch. Those 12 points gave Liberty a 69-67 lead with less than three minutes left.
Mississippi State eventually took a 70-69 lead, but Liberty senior guard Lovell Cabbil Jr. took after his teammate and popped a 3-pointer to give the Flames the lead again. They never looked back from there.
Sitting in a similar position as he did the day before -- slumped back in a chair with cameras in his face -- Peters wasn't feeling as calm and confident as the day before. Those emotions were replaced by dejection and despair.
"I felt like we had it," Peters said grimly. "I felt like we had it."