The men's basketball team, after being off more than a week, had a strong showing Tuesday, Dec. 11 against Grambling State, winning 92-42.
The Tigers had a relatively weak first period, scoring only 27 points on 9 of 26 shooting.
Grambling State also had a slow start, scoring only 15 points in the first half.
After a weak first half, Auburn head coach Tony Barbee told his players to keep at it.
"I just told them I'm going to chalk this first half up to finals, multiple practices, 10 days off since our last game rust," Barbee said. "I said, 'Let's knock the rust off,' because we got good looks in the first half. Shots we made in the second half, we had those same looks in the first half, and they didn't go in."
Auburn came out on fire after halftime.
The Tigers opened second-period play with a 12-1 scoring run two minutes in and never looked back.
When the final buzzer sounded, Auburn had scored 65 points in the second half, the most by Auburn in a half since 2006 against Tennessee.
Major contributions came from junior guard Chris Denson with 13 points, senior guard Noel Johnson with 14 points and freshman guard Jordan Price, who scored all of his 14 points in the second half and was 4-4 from three-point range.
Denson played in his first game of the season and added needed talent to the Tigers' back-court play.
"Not playing for the first eight games and seeing my team going through that hard stretch really hurt," Denson said. "It was definitely a sigh of relief I think I brought a lot of energy and a scoring spark that we needed to get the W today."
Auburn had five players score in double-digit figures, shot 54 percent from the field and was 45.8 percent from three-point land.
Price said the victory was a nice change of pace from the previous four losses the Tigers sustained.
"It feels better than losing," Price said. "Our coach in the beginning said winning is contagious, so hopefully this win will rub off on us and we'll just continue to press forward and win some more games."
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