The East Tennessee State University (ETSU) men’s basketball team is set to host the Chattanooga Mocs in a nationally televised game on Wednesday night at Freedom Hall Civic Center in Johnson City, Tennessee. The matchup will begin at 7 p.m. and will be broadcast live on CBS Sports Network.
With six games left in the 2025-26 regular season, ETSU leads Wofford by one game in the Southern Conference (SoCon) standings. Furman and Mercer are now three games behind ETSU. The team’s “magic number” to clinch the regular season title stands at six, while four is needed for a top-two seed and three for a first-round bye.
This marks ETSU’s fifth of six scheduled national television appearances this season. Since last year, the Bucs have posted a 6-1 record on national TV, with their only loss coming against North Carolina on December 16, 2025.
A key storyline for ETSU involves its point guard, who is close to reaching 300 career assists—a milestone achieved by only eight other players in school history. He currently has 294 assists. Strothers has contributed by setting up teammates such as Morris and Barkley, as well as others playing inside. Morris ranks among the top thirty players nationwide in field goal percentage at nearly sixty percent, while Barkley has scored double figures in twelve consecutive games and tallied fifteen or more points eight times during that stretch. McCullum has also increased his scoring recently, averaging over fourteen points per game with strong shooting accuracy.
Chattanooga enters the contest having lost five of its last six games. During this span, they were held under seventy points four times and managed seventy-one points in another loss to The Citadel last Saturday. Offensively, Chattanooga ranks eighth in the SoCon for scoring and falls outside the top three hundred teams nationally for rebounds per game; however, they remain effective from beyond the arc—ranking twenty-second nationally with just over ten made three-pointers per game at a rate above thirty-five percent.
The two programs have faced each other 104 times since their first meeting in December 1961—making Chattanooga ETSU’s second most frequent opponent after Appalachian State. Chattanooga leads the all-time series fifty-six wins to forty-eight but saw its recent five-game regular-season winning streak snapped when ETSU won their previous encounter earlier this year by one point.
For additional information about ETSU men’s basketball, visit ETSUBucs.com.
