South Alabama swept Arkansas State during the regular season, but could not finish the job against the Red Wolves the third time around.

Arkansas State claimed a 74-71 victory over the Jaguars on Sunday night at Pensacola (Fla.) Bay Center, bouncing the No. 1 seed in the Sun Belt men’s basketball tournament semifinals. The Red Wolves (24-9) advance to Monday night’s championship game vs. either Troy or James Madison, while South Alabama (21-11) heads home.

“We didn’t have our best stuff today,” South Alabama coach Richie Riley said. “That wasn’t our best, but you’ve got give them credit. Arkansas State, they’ve got a really good team. We had a couple battles with them in the regular season.

“We were able to find a way to win those, but today we couldn’t. It wasn’t our best. I’m just so disappointed for our guys.”

Arkansas State led for almost the entire second half, and by as many as eight in the final two minutes. The Red Wolves made 12 3-pointers, five of them by Joseph Pinion, who scored 23 points.

South Alabama got 27 points and 13 rebounds from All-Sun Belt forward Barry Dunning, with senior Elijah Ormiston adding 21 and nine. However, the Jaguars turned the ball over at inopportune times late, and missed a number of free throws that could have kept the score more manageable.

Kobe Julien scored 14 points for Arkansas State, but turned in a monster game defensively. He collected four steals, picking Dunning’s pocket on back-to-back possessions as the Red Wolves extended their lead from 65-61 to 69-61 with 1:43 to play.

“It was unbelievable,” Arkansas State coach Bryan Hodgson said. “You want to talk about making winning plays down the stretch? Those are winning plays. … (Julien) preps at a high level. He watches a lot of film and I’m glad he’s with us. We’ve got a veteran dude that’s been in this position before, and when we needed to get a stop, he got us two big ones.”

Said Julien: “(Dunning) was having a great game and then the coaches called me out. ‘Who’s gonna stop him, who’s gonna make a game-winning play?’ It was time to win a game and I just went out there and did what I had to do on defense.”

South Alabama trailed 71-65 when Ormiston was fouled on a 3-point attempt with 30 seconds remaining. The Jaguars’ most-reliable free-throw shooter at better than 80% for the season, he missed the first two to keep it a two-possession game.

After Arkansas State’s Izaiyah Nelson missed the front end of a one-and-one 25 seconds left, Dunning missed a 3-point attempt after the Jaguars got the rebound. Nelson rebounded Dunning’s miss and was fouled with 13 seconds to play, and this time made both freebies to essentially put the game away before the Jaguars made a couple of meaningless baskets in the final seconds.

In addition to Pinion and Julien, Arkansas State also got 11 points from Terrance Ford and 10 from Nelson in just 21 minutes due to first-half foul trouble. All-Sun Belt guard Taryn Todd scored just nine while also dealing with foul issues.

Myles Corey added 12 points for South Alabama, though no other Jaguar score more than four. USA was just 2-for-12 on 3-pointers, and seemed to lack confidence from beyond the arc, Riley said.

“They defended the three pretty good,” Riley said. “But we turned down some rhythm threes that we normally would take because the ball wasn’t going in early. And I think sometimes when you’re in one of these big ball games like this, you’re just trying to get it to the rim a lot. And we did that.

“I mean, we got 40 points in the paint. We got to the free-throw line. We would have liked to have made a few more of those. … They ran us off the line at times. But we turned some down to try to get to the paint.”

It was a disappointing end to a memorable season for South Alabama, which earned at least a share of the Sun Belt regular-season title for the first time in 17 years after being picked 11th in the preseason by league coaches. The Jaguars finished in a four-way tie with Troy, James Madison and Arkansas State, but claimed the top tournament seed via tiebreaker based on a 4-1 record vs. those teams during the regular season.

South Alabama reached the Sun Belt championship as the 8-seed in 2023, but has been eliminated after just one tournament game in each of the last two seasons. However, Riley noted that the difference between this season and last — in which the Jaguars limped to a 16-16 finish — is “drastic.”

“It is 100%,” Riley said. “It still hurts the same, whether you lose the first game or you lose a championship game like we’ve done before, or you lose a semifinal game, it still hurts.

“You hurt for your kids. You hurt for these dudes. But where our program’s at versus where we were at this time last year, it’s a drastic change.”

The Sun Belt Conference championship game is set for 6 p.m. Monday, with television coverage on ESPN2.