By JOHN BOHNENKAMP

MACOMB, Ill. — Isaiah Griffin knows how quickly a season can flip.

Griffin was on an Idaho State team two seasons ago that finished 14-20 and went 7-11 in Big Sky Conference play. But the Vandals got hot in the conference tournament, winning two games to reach the semifinals as the eighth seed in the 10-team event.

It’s why Griffin, now playing at Western Illinois, is telling his teammates to keep working this season despite their current record.

“I’m one of the older guys, I’ve played a lot,” Griffin said after the Leathernecks fell to Tennessee State 90-68 at Western Hall on Thursday night. “So I’m just trying to keep the positivity going throughout the whole team, just telling us it’s not over. My last school, we started off bad, and then we ended up making a huge run in a conference tournament. So I’m trying to tell them, it can change at any moment, especially in this conference, it’s so up and down. Anybody can win any game.”

It was the fifth consecutive loss for the Leathernecks (4-12 overall, 0-5 Ohio Valley Conference). Four of those losses have come to the four teams tied at the top of the OVC, something Griffin has made sure to point out to his teammates.

“We’re going to make some changes, but we’re not quitting,” said Griffin, who led the Leathernecks with 14 points. “We know this can turn around. We’ve played the top teams so far. Now let’s see what we can do against some of the others.”

The Leathernecks, though, need to make shots, something they didn’t do in this game. They were 21 of 55 from the field, but just 1 of 12 in 3-pointers, and had just two assists.

“We had good looks, but we’ve had good looks all year and we haven’t made them,” said coach Chad Boudreau, whose team ranks last in the OVC in field goal percentage. “We had one assist with four minutes to go in the game, and we ended up with two. That’s not being selfish, that just means we weren’t making shots.”

That allowed Tennessee State (10-5, 4-1) to get its offense going. The Tigers shot 55.7% for the game.

“The thing that’s frustrating for me in this game, and it’s been like we have seen this all year — when shots aren’t falling, our effort drops. Our energy comes from us making shots, and we haven’t made shots consistently all year. And so when that happens, our energy drops off, and the effort falls off defensively.”

Twenty-one of Western Illinois’ points came on free throws.

“Our shots are coming from getting fouled,” Boudreau said. “And that’s not winning basketball.

Antwaun Massey had 12 points for Western Illinois. Lucas Lorenzen had 11 points, and Karyiek Dixon had 10.

Travis Harper II had 23 points to lead the Tigers.

Tennessee State led 42-28 at halftime and led by as much as 28 points in the second half.

“They want to score 90 to 100 points,” Boudreau said. “We knew we’d have to hold them under 70 because we’re struggling to score. We just can’t score right now, and we can’t make shots. That falls on coaching and me and we’ve got to make some sort of changes. And I don’t like to — I like to stick with what we’re doing. But we’ve got to do something different.”