BEAUMONT, Texas - Lamar University (5-6) attempted to fight through 10 walks Saturday in the series finale against Brigham Young University (7-3) but the attempt ultimately fell short in the 4-0 result in favor of BYU.

"Coming into this series we knew BYU had one of the best pitching staffs in the country and we saw that all weekend," said head coach Will Davis. "[Justin] Sterner was their best guy on paper and he proved to be that. He came in with a .129 opponents' batting average so we knew we'd have our hands full. We watched video of him and thought we had as good of a plan as we could, but at the end of the day when guys have really good stuff like that it's hard to fight them tooth and nail and string anything together. We weren't able to do that today. On the mound we pitched out of some jams and played well on defense, and we're really close to being the team we want to be, but we need some more guys to step up for us."

Noah Sills threw five innings with five hits allowed, three earned runs, four strikeouts, and three walks. The senior from Honolulu, Hawaii, went 1-2-3 in the first inning with two strikeouts before his first walk of the day, a single, and a sac fly scored the first run for BYU in the second inning. The Cougars stranded two on base in the third with Sills' third strikeout but continued to put runners on base in the fourth. Back-to-back singles to open the inning reached second and third on a sac bunt and both runs came home on a one-out double. A strikeout and a pop-out ended the fourth with BYU leading 3-0.

Neither team scored in the fifth, sixth, or seventh innings as BYU twice loaded the bases and left all six Cougars on thanks to terrific work from Jack Dallas, but BYU wasn't quite done scoring. Consecutive walks to open the eighth reached second and third on a sac bunt to the pitcher and a grounder to third pushed a Cougar across the plate for the final score of the game, 4-0.

Lamar collected lead-off hits from Robin Adames in the second, JC Correa in the fourth and Avery George in the sixth and had lead-off walks from Rhett McCall in the third and Logan LeJeune in the fifth but struggled to string together hits and walks. George's two hits keep alive his 10-game hit streak and 21-game reached base streak.

The Cardinals return to action on Tuesday with non-conference action at Houston Baptist University (4-6) at 2 p.m. before coming home to open Southland Conference play with a three-game home stand against Stephen F. Austin on March 8-10.