By Michael Haag | Sports Editor
At long last, Baylor basketball has a new home.
The No. 18 Baylor men’s squad uncorked the new Foster Pavilion with a 98-79 victory over Cornell on Tuesday night, and it happened in front of a sold-out audience of 7,500 people.
The official opening happened on schedule, as the ground was broken in May 2022 with games scheduled in the venue for January 2024. There are still aspects of the $212 million facility that aren’t completed outside of the court, but the pavilion was ready for games after its 20-month construction.
“Well, I can tell you we waited a long time to have a home-court advantage like this, and this is everything you dream of,” head coach Scott Drew, who’s in his 21st season at Baylor, said.
Freshman guard Ja’Kobe Walter led the Bears (11-2) offensively with his second straight 20-point outing of the season and fifth overall. Walter finished with 23 points and a career-high nine rebounds.
Walter, a former five-star recruit from McKinney, committed to Baylor in June 2022 with the promise of a new arena midway through the 2023-24 season. The 6-foot-5 guard said it was “real cool” to be the Baylor team that finished the Ferrell Center and opened the Foster Pavilion.
“The lights are bright in here, the energy was good,” Walter said. “It was packed, I liked the way the crowd was.”
Senior guard RayJ Dennis (18), freshman forward Yves Missi (16) and junior guard Jayden Nunn (10) were the only other Bears in double figures, as they helped stave off a 15-0 second-half run by the Big Red (10-3).
With a 10-2 record going into Tuesday’s contest, Cornell was off to its best start after 12 games in a season since 1967-68 when it also went 10-2.
“They just have a lot of weapons,” Cornell head coach Brian Earl said of Baylor. “They’re fun to watch if you’re not taking a beating. They do the right thing and play for each other a little bit more than some other teams.”
Baylor took a 58-42 halftime lead thanks to 24 combined points by Walter and Missi. The Bears also connected on 8 of 19 shots from deep and scored 13 second-chance points on seven offensive rebounds.
Missi, whose 16 points marked a career high, scored the first points in Foster Pavilion history with a putback with 19:30 to play in the first half. He finished on a perfect 8-of-8 shooting from the floor and became the first player since Flo Thamba in 2021 to shoot 1.000 taking at least eight shots.
Redshirt sophomore guard Langston Love made the first 3-point field goal in Foster Pavilion history with 14:20 to play in the first half.
The Bears extended their lead to 70-48 four minutes into the second half, but the Big Red went on a 15-0 run over the next six minutes to trim their deficit to seven points. Walter hit a 3-pointer to silence the run and Missi scored a second-chance basket put Baylor back on top by double digits.
“Give credit to Cornell,” Dennis said of the Big Red’s second-half run. “They’re a good team and they ran their stuff, they didn’t get rattled. But basketball is a game of runs and we pride ourselves on being able to withstand those runs, and make some of our own and finish games.”
The Bears never let Cornell get within 10 points of tying it the rest of the way, and they wound up with the 98-79 victory. Baylor shot 45% (14 of 31) from deep and are now 79-4 under Drew when scoring 90-plus points.
Aside from winning the first game in the new venue, Drew said he’s grateful to be a part of something like this since it rarely happens.
“I’ve been a part of the community now for over 21 years, and it’s as big for people that don’t even follow basketball to have an arena like this for concerts, for restaurants, for hotels,” Drew said. “It makes for downtown, it really adds to the community. It’s really cool and neat and something the community deserves.”
Baylor will now enter conference play, starting with a road test at Oklahoma State. Tipoff for the Bears’ Big 12 opener is scheduled for 2 p.m. on Saturday in the Gallagher-Iba Arena in Stillwater, Okla., and it can be watched on Big 12 Now on ESPN+.
