This was big.

The largest crowd of the season had come out to see Southeast Missouri State try to pick up its seventh consecutive win to open Ohio Valley Conference play, a feat the program had not accomplished since the 1998-99 season. The opponent Monday was the hated rival, Murray State, where Southeast coach Scott Edgar once roamed the sidelines.

The Redhawks picked the wrong night to throw up a brick.

A whole lot of bricks, actually.

Southeast made just 15 of 60 shots from the field in suffering a 79-51 loss to the Racers, a decision that left Austin Peay as the lone unbeaten team remaining in league play.

"Everybody has their nights," Southeast senior David Johnson said. "This was just one of those nights we couldn't get anything going.

"We can't hit every shot, but the shots we took are our shots, but we couldn't get them to go down."

Southeast opened the game hitting just one of its first 14 shots while digging a 17-4 deficit.

The Redhawks opened the second half with one field goal in their first 11 shots.

Despite that woeful display, they still managed to be within 10 points to that point. And then it got ugly.

In the end, it wasn't close at all. Murray State went on a 10-3 run midway through the second half to build a 15-point lead.

Of the 4,023 who attended, those who stayed for the bitter end did get to see a record -- the largest margin of defeat in the 20-year history of the Show Me Center, surpassing a 26-point loss to South Florida in 1996.

Southeast shot 5-for-21 on 3-pointers, and the inside game wasn't much better. Big men Michael Rembert, Will Bogan and Calvin Williams combined for 3-of-12 shooting. Other than guard Marcus Rhodes (15 points), the rest of the Redhawks were 9-for-50.

"I think we missed between 15 and 25 heavily and semi-contested shots around the basket throughout the game," Edgar said. "For whatever reason, it just wasn't our night, and we didn't bow our necks and create old-fashioned and-ones.

"I think we're a good shooting team. We're just in a slump."

But there's little time for slumps as Southeast moves on in what Edgar called the most difficult stretch of the season.

"Basically after tonight, we're going to forget about this game," Southeast senior Brandon Foust said.

That will be a good thing. Southeast goes to Austin Peay on Saturday, then to Tennessee State and Tennessee Tech before returning home Jan. 24 against Morehead State. They follow that with a road game at Murray State.

"We're happy everyone came out, and we hope they keep coming out because we're going to get a lot more wins," Foust said.

Said Edgar: "I'm glad the excitement has started to rekindle, and we have to work hard to get it back. We've got to go on the road and steal some wins now."

Or at least not give them away so freely as they did Monday.

Toby Carrig is editor of semoball.com