“It can happen again,” he said. “But I wasn’t going to let that happen.”

Some lessons are learned the hard way.

Big leads that got away are a common storyline in college basketball and can do severe damage to a team’s NCAA Tournament hopes, as the Billikens discovered in the 2021-22 season.

This season they have experienced both ends of the spectrum and hope to be changing the narrative when it comes to protecting leads.

“Holding onto leads is not a given,” guard Gibson Jimerson said. “I think we’re managing the game better. You’re seeing more guys than Yuri making plays, which has opened more offense and allowed us to keep those leads. We’re making better decisions.”

SLU lost five games last season after leading at some time by at least 10 points. The Billikens are one of fewer than 50 teams in the country that has lost six or more such games in the last two seasons, according to Ken Pomeroy at KenPom.com.

Overall, the Billikens have seen 13 leads of 10 or more points disappear in their last 48 games. They have won seven.

While the loss to SIUE will be hard to forget, SLU also has shown more resilience this season, digging out of late holes to win against Providence, Drake and George Mason.

“We’re trying to find the fine line of playing aggressive and fast at times,” coach Travis Ford said of protecting big leads. “We try to manage it a little better late in games. We don’t want to slow it down if we have opportunities, but I we don’t we need to make sure we’re moving the ball and making the defense work.”

Said Jimerson: “I don’t want to say we were stalling (with big leads) but playing to keep the leads instead of continuing to play our game.”

It’s not only coaches that try to figure out why their teams squander big leads. Exhaustive studies have been done for journals with titles such as “When suddenly nothing works anymore within a team” and “Coaches’ and sports psychologist’ perceptions on causes of collective sports team collapse.”

A bottled remedy has not been developed.

But things have gone much better of late for SLU, which has won its last six games and is in first place in the Atlantic 10 Conference entering a game Tuesday at Fordham.

A solution last season might have helped SLU get into the NCAA Tournament with a couple of more wins against strong opponents. Lost leads were especially painful against Auburn, Belmont and Alabama-Birmingham at Chaifetz Arena.

Other than the SIUE game, SLU has lost double-digit leads against four other opponents this season but won. The Billikens led Drake by 10, Evansville by 14, St. Joseph’s by 11 and Davidson by 10, only to see them tie or take the lead.

There have been other close calls. SIU Carbondale cut a 13-point SLU lead to two in the second half. Memphis pulled within two after trailing the Billikens by 15. George Washington also was within two after SLU went up by 17.

“A lot of time we get a lead and get comfortable,” Collins said. “Now we’re going into timeouts, talking about the game not being over, talking about things on the court and not getting comfortable. You see how the game is played and teams come back from all types of (deficits).”

The biggest margin overcome for a win in college came in 2018, when Drexel beat Delaware after trailing by 34 points. They say basketball is a game of runs, so if one team can do it, why not the other?

Ford has tended to tighten his rotation in the second halves of games. Against St. Bonaventure, he had regulars on the floor until the end of a 23-point win. The starters were in the game at the end of a 17-point win at Loyola-Chicago.

“We had a few this year where we got very careless with turnovers and teams made crucial shots on us,” Ford said. “There are things we can change but sometimes other teams pick it up and play well and things go perfectly their way. There’s always something that you can look back and say, ‘I should have done something different.’”