After this weekend, it's time for us to play a little game. With the Ohio men's basketball team knocking off the first-place Miami RedHawks in The Convo on Saturday, the Bobcats have begun to sell themselves as a contender in the Mid-American Conference East Division.
At 13-8, and a strong 8-5 in the MAC, they boast a 10-game winning streak at home this season and have won 11 in Athens dating to last year.
Impressive.
But a question still lurks in the mind of the common sports fan at Ohio. Who are these guys?
So, to help Athens get a little more acquainted with this group, we're going to play Get to Know Your Team.
The coach is a man named Tim O'Shea. For those of you on campus old enough to remember a time when Taco Bell had an upstairs, you'll remember O'Shea as the once-hot coach put on the hot seat last season for three years of underachieving. Last year ads were run in The Post calling for Director of Athletics Thomas Boeh to Clean house at The Convo. This had little to do with the mess of papers O'Shea had in his office and more to do with giving him the old Brian Knorr treatment.
But O'Shea bounced back with a quiet team that has learned his system and how to win with little ball. They play an athletic team game that wasn't a staple of O'Shea's earlier teams.
No one on this team is in the top 10 in the MAC in scoring (Mychal Green is 11th at 14.9), but if you're stat obsessed like I am, then you'll enjoy our next Bobcat, Leon Williams.
Williams is third on the team in scoring, dropping in a solid 11.1 points a night, but he's doing it in the paint on smart basketball. He leads the team and is third in the MAC with a 64.3 field goal percentage. Tack on the 7.6 boards he brings home with him every night, and you have a man in the middle who paints the lane green.
But Williams can't go at it alone, and he gets help from the aforementioned Green, who sets the pace for the team in scoring and adds four rebounds and almost two assists per night.
Keeping with the theme of solid play, superstar player Sonny Troutman sets the trend of near-spectacular numbers by scoring 12.2 points and adding 3.5 assists a game, both good for second on the team. He's also shooting a solid 84 percent from the free throw line, something that could be very helpful down the stretch.
In keeping with the rigid lines of the newspaper format, we will only meet two more Bobcats today, senior Terren Harbut and freshman Jeremy Fears. Harbut, whose played on enough losing teams to know he wants to be on a winner, chips in nine points a night and put up a solid 15 against the RedHawks this weekend. Fears, the precocious freshman who drops 10 points a night, is still a little turnover crazy, but four games this season with 15 or more points have him leaving quite a vision for the future.
There are of course strong role players that we haven't met yet. Some are solid scorers, like forward Jeff Halbert. Others have names that will surely inspire fear in their opponents, like Stephen King, but I don't think I have to write anymore about them -they're playing Akron in The Convo Wednesday. You can go meet this team yourself.
-Cottrill is a senior English major who likes Stephen King the basketball player much more than Stephen King the writer. Send him an email at michael.cottrill@ohio.edu
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Mike Cottrill
