Wyoming

11-0 second-half run powers No. 20 Utah State to blowout win over Wyoming

Published

2 years ago

January 10, 2024

11-0 second-half run powers No. 20 Utah State to blowout win over Wyoming

Utah State came into Tuesday night’s game with a target on its back after getting ranked in the Top 25 for the first time this season. And for the first 20 minutes, it appeared that the Cowboys might have the 20th-ranked Aggies in their sights.

But after leading by just two points at halftime, Utah State exploded for an 11-0 run to open the second half and cruised to an 83-59 victory over Wyoming.

“I think we came out a little bit sluggish after the emotional win (Saturday over then-No. 13 Colorado State),” USU guard Darius Brown II noted. “But after halftime, we knew we had to get better and just come out and put our stamp on the game.”

The Aggies (15-1 overall, 3-0 in the Mountain West) have now won 14 straight games, which serves as the longest current winning streak in the country. Houston, which opened the season 14-0, suffered its first loss of the year Tuesday at Iowa State.

Utah State head coach Danny Sprinkle, who is off to the best start of any first-year basketball coach in USU history, has yet to lose a game in the Spectrum at the helm of the Aggies.

“Unbelievable crowd again,” Sprinkle said. “I appreciate everybody coming, especially with the blizzard outside. But the Spectrum never lets you down. The place was rocking.

“When we started making that run and finally got some stops and some steals and some run-out dunks in that second half, the place was just electric. They win games for us.”

Brown, who secured a double-double with more than 13 minutes left in the game, ended up with 13 points, 11 assists and just one turnover, while junior forward Great Osobor, the reigning Mountain West Player of the Week, finished with 20 points and eight rebounds.

The duo, who both transferred from Montana State when Sprinkle was hired away from the Bobcats last spring, combined for 13 of USU’s first 16 points of the game, then caught fire again at the start of the second half. After Osobor scored on the left side of the basket, sophomore center Isaac Johnson knocked down his second 3-pointer of the game to extend USU’s advantage to 40-33.

Brown buried a 12-foot jumper a few minutes later, then after Johnson snared a defensive rebound, he fired a pass ahead to a streaking Osobor for a breakaway slam dunk that extended USU’s lead to 44-33.

That led to a massive eruption from the crowd of 8,214 people who braved an early-evening snow squall in Cache Valley to reach the Spectrum, but Wyoming head coach Jeff Linder elected not to call timeout. That proved to be a mistake when Brown promptly came up with a steal to trigger another fast break that resulted in another transition dunk for Osobor.

“Great’s one of my best friends and my roommate, and we have great chemistry together,” Brown said of Osobor. “We talk about a lot of things with each other — and not just basketball — and really know how to communicate with each other, and that goes a long way on the floor.

“I know where he’s going to be, and he knows where I’m going to be. We had a great relationship at Montana State that’s just carried over.”

The Aggies, who ended up totaling 24 assists, 11 steals and outscoring the Cowboys 14-0 on fast-break points, scored 30 of the first 42 points of the second half in just 12 minutes to leave Wyoming (8-8, 1-2).

“In the first half, obviously, you put yourself in a position going in the half, and the problem is it’s not a 20-minute game, it’s a 40-minute game,” Linder said. “… I give Coach Sprinkle and their team credit. It’s not like they’re a team where they go out there and wow you with their athleticism, just freaky talented. But what they do have is they got their starting five, they don’t make a lot of mistakes.

“And it starts with Darius Brown and Great Osobor, two guys that were Big Sky players. Darius Brown started his career at Northridge in the Big West and then the Big Sky, and that’s what guys don’t realize is how good players are, like winning players, and that’s what those two guys are. They set the tone.”

After making just one of nine 3-point attempts in the first half, the Aggies went 5-for-13 from beyond the arc in the second half, while shooting nearly 61% overall from the field.

Johnson finished with 10 points, and starting guard Mason Falslev contributed nine points and three assists.

The Cowboys’ leading scorer, Sam Griffin, who came into the game averaging more than 18 points a game, finished with just seven points on 3-of-9 shooting. Senior forward Mason Walters led the visitors with 17 points, and senior guard Akuel Kot totaled 14 points.

“Wyoming had our respect,” Sprinkle said. “I had a bunch of people say, ‘Hey, is there going to be a letdown after Colorado State?’ We’re not good enough to have a letdown. I love our guys’ mindset of getting better. They came on Sunday and we turned a page. We barely talked about Colorado State. It was over and they locked into the scout and what we needed to do to be successful tonight, and they did it.”

The first-place Aggies will put their winning streak on the line Saturday afternoon at UNLV.

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Wyoming

Wyoming firefighters hosting breakfast

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1 hour ago

November 8, 2025

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Wyoming

CSI men’s basketball defeats Western Wyoming in Battle for the Boot tournament opener

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19 hours ago

November 7, 2025

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CSI men’s basketball defeats Western Wyoming in Battle for the Boot tournament opener

TWIN FALLS, Idaho (KMVT/KSVT) — The College of Southern Idaho men’s basketball team defeated the Western Wyoming Mustangs 81-62 in the opening round of the Battle for the Boot tournament Thursday night.

The Golden Eagles, who entered the game with a 2-0 record, controlled the game with balanced scoring and strong defensive play.

Jalen Lyn led the way scoring-wise as he poured in 26 and Nate Ahner was right behind him with a 20-point night of his own.

Defensively Kobe Kesler and Nate Anher each forced four turnovers, three blocks and a steal for Kesler and vice versa for Ahner.

CSI established an early rhythm in the first half with crisp ball movement thanks in large part to Ace Reiser who led the team with seven assists, many coming late in the first half.

The Golden Eagles led by 10 at half and pulled away even more in the second to secure the 19-point victory and improve to 3-0 on the season.

The Golden Eagles will face Clarendon College Friday night at 7:00 in their tournament semifinal matchup.

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Wyoming

Elections committee forwards 7 more election revamp bills to session

Published

2 days ago

November 5, 2025

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Elections committee forwards 7 more election revamp bills to session

Legislative attempts to bolster the integrity of Wyoming elections, which some officials statewide insist are already trustworthy, aren’t disappearing anytime soon.

That’s after Wyoming lawmakers on the interim Joint Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee forwarded seven bills that would revamp the way the state runs and operates its election processes. Wyoming voted for Pres. Trump more than any other state in 2024.

The seven bills could make recounts more common, restrict ballot harvesting, require more signatures for independent candidates to get onto general election ballots, allow for more hand count audits, and ban the use of student and non-photo IDs when voting.

The seven draft bills include:

Sen. Bill Landen (R-Casper) said one of his constituents told him the ID bill could make it harder for his 87-year-old mom to vote.

“I circle back and go, ‘Well, what exactly are we doing here?’” said Landen.

Supporters of the legislation, like Wyoming Freedom Caucus member Rep. Steve Johnson (R-Cheyenne), repeated the contention that the bills are about bolstering election integrity in a state where some feel its elections could be manipulated and that policy should be reshaped based on that possibility.

The latest suite of bills to reconfigure state elections come as doubts about election integrity have increased following false claims that the 2020 general election was stolen from Pres. Donald Trump.

Johnson quoted from the Wyoming Constitution during discussion of the independent candidates bill.

“Article Six, Section Thirteen: ‘Purity of elections to be provided for,’” he read, continuing, “that’s the major cause [of why] we’re here. We want our elections to be free and fair and honest. And there’s a lot of people that don’t think that necessarily all the elections are free and fair.”

Critics said repeated discussions of the need for election integrity are themselves undermining confidence in elections.

“The comments about the decrease in confidence reminds me of the man who murdered his parents and then threw himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan,” said Gail Symons, who operates the Wyoming civics website Civics307 and ran unsuccessfully for a state House seat in Sheridan in the last primary. “We’re losing confidence because we are always talking about how people don’t have confidence.”

The bill that would expand the use of hand counting for certain recounts caught her attention in particular, she added.

“There’s unambiguous evidence,” she said. “They are less accurate, less reliable, more time consuming, dramatically more expensive and logistically unsustainable. All of these bills are based … on assumption, supposition, speculation, conjecture, fallacy, unsubstantiated theories, baseless claims and debunked conspiracy theories.”

Officials like Secretary of State Chuck Gray have said similar election bills are about preventing voter fraud and restoring election integrity.

But a Wyoming Public Radio investigation published in October shows only 7.5% of all formal election complaints sent to Gray’s office since he took office in January 2023 to late July 2025 alleged such fraud.

The committee voted to sponsor all seven election bills in the upcoming budget session beginning on Feb. 9. They join another three election bills previously backed by the committee.

Redistricting update

After finishing consideration of the election bills, the committee turned its attention to a report from its Reapportionment Subcommittee on alternative redistricting methods for the state Legislature.

That panel was created after a bill passed in the last general session directing lawmakers to study differences in how the state and federal constitutions carve up legislative districts across the Equality State.

The issue at hand has to do with the fact that the Wyoming Constitution says counties should have at least one representative and one senator, and that districts should follow county lines.

But a federal district court case in 1991 concluded Wyoming’s districts violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution that requires equal voting weight for citizens, otherwise known as “one person, one vote.”

That case led to Wyoming’s current multi-county districts for House and Senate seats.

In the end, despite constituent suggestions in Weston County for how to get around the discrepancy, the subcommittee’s report says, “the Subcommittee does not see a path to compile [comply] with both constitutions on this issue. A reapportionment plan that has districts with greater than ten percent population deviation is extremely unlikely to survive a constitution[al] challenge under current federal court precedent.”

That said, the report ends with an entreaty to the Management Council for further study of solutions to the problem in 2026.

“It is possible that there may be actions of Congress which could help to address this issue and possibly other solutions which have not yet been presented,” the report says. “The Subcommittee requests that the Joint Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee submit this as an interim topic to the Management Council for the 2026 interim and that Management Council approves further study on this reapportionment topic.”

All bills besides the biennium budget and a possible redistricting bill will need a two-thirds majority vote for introduction in their chamber of origin just to see the light of day in February.

This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, supporting state government coverage in the state. Wyoming Public Media and Jackson Hole Community Radio are partnering to cover state issues both on air and online.

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