The Ohio men's basketball team came within 0.9 seconds of picking up a long-awaited road victory last Wednesday at Ball State, but a Cardinals' 3-pointer did in the Bobcats.
This week, Ohio (6-5 overall, 1-2 Mid-American Conference) travels to play Northern Illinois and takes another crack at gaining a road victory.
The Bobcats will take some momentum on the road with them after their 77-68 victory at home against Marshall on Sunday. During that game, Ohio got off to a hot start and maintained a lead throughout the game. By contrast, the Bobcats trailed by 16 points at halftime against Ball State.
On the road
that's real key guard Jeremy Fears said, because road wins are always hard to come across especially in the MAC. No game is an easy game. We get the lead; it would be great to keep the lead. Once we have a team down
keep them down.
Northern Illinois (5-7, 1-3 MAC) comes into the contest having lost three MAC games in a row. The Huskies' scoring is distributed evenly with seven players averaging at least seven points a game.
They're very hard to prepare for
forward Sonny Troutman said. But we're just going to have to do our best
learn their personnel
learn who can shoot
who likes to drive and what hand they like to go and do the best job we can of defending each person.
Fears said that it is harder to defend a team with balanced scoring as opposed to a team where one player stands out as the leading scorer.
Any given night you never know who is going to do what. So you just can't focus on one guy
and you have to be real prepared.
Guard Mike McKinney leads the Huskies in scoring at 10.8 points per game. The only other player averaging double figures is forward Todd Peterson, who is averaging 10.2 points. The bulk of Peterson's scoring has come from his 27-of-59 3-pointing shooting.
Troutman said a key to Ohio improving from Sunday would be to have a sense of the time and the score.
We had the lead late in the game and made a couple turnovers towards the end of game
he said. I think we need to take care of the ball more and stop them from getting offensive rebounds.
