Worthen Arena in Muncie. Miami is 8-9 (2-3). Ball State is 8-9 (1-4) with their win coming at Eastern Michigan Tuesday night. Looking at who they beat and where, that might be their best win, but recently they did lose by 5 at Toledo and 4 at Akron, those are the two undefeated teams in MAC play.
Coach Michael Lewis turned Ball State around last year in his first season in Muncie with a 20-12 record. He was a former Indiana Mr. Basketball who played for Bob Knight at Indiana. He was an assistant at UCLA the last 3 years before getting his first head coaching job at BSU.
Here are their most frequent starters:
6-9 JR Basheer jihad 18.4
6-4 JR Davion Bailey 12.6 Southeastern CC
6-3 JR Jalin Anderson 16.3 Loyola Marymount
6-8 RS JR Mickey Pearson 11.2 TCU
6-7 FR Mason Jones 5
Miami leads the all time series 66-43. Coming into MAC play, I honestly thought we would be 4-1 at this point, but losing both our point guards to injury in the first game vs WM has changed everything. Our two wins were blowouts, the other three games were close and we pretty much just gave those games away late. I do think the talent is there on our roster, but we need one or both of our point guards back to actually reach our potential.
That’s a terrible double technical foul call. Sure, Morris had some emotion after the great dunk, but the push afterward looked like it clearly outweighed anything Morris did.
We’re playing hard, getting a lot of deflections defensively. Offensively, I’d like to see more cuts off the high post with our bigs passing or handing it off.
Refs are terrible. Steele is chirping. We aren’t playing well. We should be up more than 2. Steele took Mabrey out when he was hot. Cooper turning ball over. I would like to see Kotecki get in against Jihad and maybe pick up a cheap foul on him. We truly miss Ipsaro. Need to cut the turnovers second half in half.
Rough year for Michael Lewis: Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s go 50-112, Michael Oher files a lawsuit against the Tuohys, Michael Burry loses a ton of money shorting the S&P 500, Daryl Morey gets stabbed in the back by James Harden, Sam Bankman-Fried gets convicted of fraud, and now Lewis is 1-4 in the MAC and trailing Miami at the half on his home court.
I don’t have a great feel for this game. We were handed 8 points right off the bat. Then gradually, Ball St. guarded our ballhandlers harder, causing us to turn the ball over more. I would think working the ball through the high post and using their over aggressiveness against them would work against them.
Defensively, we’re getting after them. We can’t overhelp and leave shooters open. Ball St. is a very good 3 point shooting team. They’re also a really good free throw shooting team so we can’t put them on the line.
Steele may have recruited talented players but I’ve yet to see any evidence he’s a competent in-game coach. May explain his Xavier stint. Get it together.