Wyoming had far too much Hayden Dalton for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men's basketball team Friday in Laramie.
The 6-foot-8 senior had 30 points and 13 rebounds to lead the Cowboys, who built a double-digit lead at the break but had to hold on for a 74-65 win over the baby Mocs in Lamont Paris's head-coaching debut.
UTC is back on the road Monday with a game at Alabama-Birmingham.
Nat Dixon led five Mocs in double figures with 14 points. James Lewis Jr. scored 12 in his first college game, while Rodney Chatman had 11 and Makinde London and David Jean-Baptiste each chipped in 10. Chatman also had nine rebounds and five assists in 33 minutes before fouling out, while London had eight rebounds in 24 minutes before doing the same.
The Mocs started off well before a 14-0 run swung early momentum to the Cowboys, who led by as many as 16 in the first half before a London 3-pointer cut the halftime lead to 40-29.
The Mocs gained some momentum off their finish to the first half, cutting the lead to 49-43 on a jump shot by Chatman with 10:38 to play, but the Cowboys responded with a jumper by Brodricks Jones two possessions later. While the home team's lead was never more than 11 points the rest of the way, the Mocs never got closer than seven.
The Mocs outscored Wyoming 36-34 in the second half and held the Cowboys to 36 percent shooting in the final 20 minutes (8-for-22). UTC shot 42 percent from the field in the second half and out-rebounded Wyoming 38-35 for the game despite having only nine healthy scholarship players, as 6-foot-10 freshman forward Justin Brown did not make the trip due to an injury.
"I'm just proud of how we battled back through adversity," Dixon said on the postgame radio broadcast. "We could have easily fell over and just let them run over us, but we battled the whole entire game, and I'm just so proud of my guys for that."
Dalton was the only double-figure scorer for Wyoming while also leading the team in rebounding. He was 5-for-9 from 3-point range, with all five of his makes and all but two of his attempts coming in the first 20 minutes, when he had 19 points.
It was still a much more pleasing performance for UTC than last week's exhibition game, a 68-63 loss to NCAA Division II member Francis Marion.
"I think as a general rule, we made some improvements from that exhibition, and I'm happy about that," Paris said on the radio broadcast. "How I felt was drastically different in this game than that one. We preach growth, and just because we grew in this one doesn't mean we can't go backwards in the next one, so we've got to keep going forward."
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @genehenleytfp.