Patriots' Run Ended by No. 1 Ohio State, 98-66

Unable to overcome a dominant all-around effort from the top-ranked team in the country, the George Mason men's basketball team saw its season end with a 98-66 loss to Ohio State in the third round of the NCAA Tournament on Sunday. 

The Patriots (27-7 overall), which jumped out to an early 11-2 lead despite the absence of ill sophomore Luke Hancock, quickly discovered why many consider the Buckeyes (34-2) to be the top team in the tournament and the favorite to win their first national championship since 1960. 

Behind the shooting of David Lighty and the inside play of freshman Jared Sullinger, a finalist for the national player of the year award, Ohio State would outscore George Mason 50-15 over the remainder of the opening half to take a commanding 52-26 lead into halftime, erasing any thought of the Patriots making another deep run through the bracket five years after they crashed the Final Four. 

Lighty hit all seven of his 3-point attempts en route to a game-high 25 points, Sullinger and William Buford each chipped in with 18 points and Aaron Craft had 15 assists for the Buckeyes, who advanced to the Sweet 16 and will face fourth-seeded Kentucky next weekend. 

The Patriots were without Hancock, the hero from their win over Villanova on Friday, after he came down with food poisoning on Saturday night. But his presence likely would have had a limited impact on the game's outcome anyway against the Big Ten Conference champions, which were firing on all cylinders in front of a partisan crowd at Cleveland's Quicken Loans Arena. 

"I thought [Ohio State] played great," said George Mason coach Jim Larranaga, who is now 5-5 in the NCAA Tournament with the Patriots. "They shot the ball extremely well from the perimeter, from 3-point range. They have outstanding, skilled players who know how to distribute the ball and share the ball. With Sullinger inside and that many weapons outside, it seemed like everything we tried to do defensively, they had an answer for."

George Mason senior Cam Long, who scored 16 points in his final collegiate game, agreed: "When you're trying to shut down one thing, they've got other things that open up. And if you try to shut down the block, they've got the 3's that open up. It's definitely a hard thing to guard."

The closest the eighth-seeded Patriots would draw to would be 21 in the second half as the Buckeyes continued their hot shooting after halftime, finishing the game shooting 61 percent (36-for-59) from the field and 16-for-26 from the 3-point line. 

After George Mason's initial flurry to open the game, Ohio State clamped down defensively, taking away any post presence the Patriots attempted to establish and forcing them out of their offense and into a number of off-balance shots and long 3-point attempts that Larranaga was not accustomed to seeing his team take this season. 

"We were kind of expecting that we'd be able to score the ball better than we did, but their defense was very, very good," Larranaga said. "They put a lot of pressure on us, and we were not able to get the quality shots that we're used to getting. 

"The end result was that after a quick start for us early, they were able to shut our offense down and ended up with a big lead at halftime and we were unable to cut into that."

Junior Ryan Pearson was the only other George Mason player to reach double-figures, finishing with 13 points.