Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Ooooooottttiiiiiiiiissssssss

The Falcons followed up on their road win at OU with a nice home win over Ball State. As I noted in the preview, Ball State's success against their MAC West brethren notwithstanding, they have struggled this year. Still, for this team there are no bad wins, and this one was a good one to get. BG is now 3-3 in the MAC.

The 62-58 final is about what we would have expected from these two defensive minded teams. It was a close game, in fact, and was within one possession in the last :30 or so. Chris Knight showed his ability with a huge block on a fastbreak for the Cardinals in the closing minute to help keep the Falcons in the lead.  As you can see below, the Falcons led most of the way, but never by very much.



Our leading scorer was....Otis POLK!! with 13 points. In fact, he was our only player in double figures.  Otis was 5-5 from the field, and 3-4 from the line, so Otis let nine shots fly tonight and eight went through the net.  Very nice.

I don't know when else he has been our leading scorer, but everyone likes to see Otis thrive.  Admit it.  Go ahead.

As you can see in the chart below, there were a couple of facets that really helped us win.  First, we shot better than we normally do--by a lot--and we also killed Ball State at the free throw line.



A couple other notes.

Dee Brown did not play at all and Marc Larson did not dress due to injury, so we ran a considerably tighter rotation then we have in other weeks.

Erik Marschall had 7 points in 11 minutes, a fine contribution off the bench.  (He also had four fouls).

Jarrod Jones, the BSU Fr. had 15 points and 8 boards, which is pretty good for a freshmen.  I'd say he is the clubhouse leader to be freshmen of the year.

So, a nice win and a pretty nice crowd given the weather and what we have been drawing.  We are back to .500 for the season, and with a "modest" two game streak, things are looking much better.  Saturday we play an NIU team that is just not real good, and who we should be able to beat, even in DeKalb.

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