Ball State University Athletics
Ball State University
19-11 (10-7MAC)
Central Michigan
17-13 (10-7MAC)
Men's Hoops Goes Cold in Senior Night Loss to CMU
March 01, 2016 | Men's Basketball
By Doug Zaleski
BallStateSports.com
Talk about one extreme to another.
On Saturday, Ball State scored 61 points in the first half against Eastern Michigan on the way to posting the fifth-highest scoring game in school history (115).
On Tuesday, the Cardinals failed to find the same kind of rhythm on offense and lost their grip on the outright Mid-American Conference West Division lead and a chance to lock up a first-round bye in the league tournament.
Ball State suffered through one of its worst shooting performances of the season and fell 65-57 to Central Michigan in Worthen Arena.
"Our overall intensity wasn't where it needed to be at the beginning of the game," Cardinals forward Ryan Weber said. "At the end, we stepped up when our backs were against the wall, but it was too late. Credit Central because they won the game, but I feel like we didn't have our best.
"We came out kind of flat. … We didn't play like ourselves for 40 minutes."
The Cardinals never found their shooting stroke. Their .365 field-goal percentage was only a sliver better than their previous low (.364) this season.
One game after breaking school records with 18 3-point baskets and 39 attempts from the arc, Ball State was only 5-for-22 for a .227 percentage. Its season low is .222.
Ball State (19-11, 10-7 MAC West) had plenty at stake in the contest. A win would have given the Cardinals the division championship and a first-round bye in next week's MAC tournament.
 "There's a savvy and experience (needed) in a game like this to block all that out," Cardinals coach James Whitford said. "And for the first time, guys are thinking, 'If we win this game, it means this, this and this.'
"It takes your focus away from what it really needs to be. … You have to lock in on the things that help you win the game. We weren't successfully able to do that tonight."
Ball State's guards and perimeter shooters never got on track.
Point guard Francis Kiapway managed only two points on a layup with 14.5 seconds left in the game. He hit only 1-of-8 field goals. Shooting guard Jeremie Tyler didn't score, missing all four of his field-goal attempts.
"Jeremie didn't play his best tonight, and I'll have to watch it (on video) to get a feel for what it was," Whitford said. "And Francis played the game the right way. Sometimes you go 4-for-6 (from the 3-point line), sometimes you're 0-for-6. Central was very aware of trying to take away his 3's.
Together, Kiapway and Tyler were 0-for-9 from the 3-point line. Weber was 1-for-5 as three of the Cardinals' top shooters from the arc combined to go 1-for-14.
Against Eastern Michigan, they combined to make nine 3-pointers.Weber said at times players can feed off each other when shots are falling.
"It's like the sun is shining and everybody can play well," he said. "When you see people miss, it's like, 'Dang, we can't throw it in the ocean.' It was just a bad shooting night for us."
Another area that plagued the Cardinals was rebounding on the offensive boards. Central Michigan ranks next-to-last in the MAC in defensive rebounding percentage, but Ball State didn't get an offensive board in the first half and finished with just six (three each by House and Calhoun).
"One of the things we had to do was exploit them on the glass," Whitford said. "We had to get more possessions on the glass than we did tonight. … Inexplicably to me, we were not pursing balls on the glass on the offensive end with the aggressiveness we needed to. We were standing and watching early in the game."
The result of all the things that went against the Cardinals was a hole too deep from which to recover. The Chippewas (17-13, 10-7 MAC West) expanded a 28-26 halftime lead to a game-high 13 points (57-44) as late as 5:14 to play.
Ball State made a furious burst to get within six at 57-51 with 3:43 to go, but the threat ended there.
"We came out kind of lackadaisical," Cardinals forward Franko House said. "Senior Night, I don't know if it made our energy die, but we didn't come out with the right energy and didn't play with the right energy until the second half.
"There were times where I personally could feel that. We didn't have the energy or the defensive talk that we usually have, and that we really had in the Eastern game."
House scored a career-high 23 points, shooting 6-for-11 from the field and 11-for-14 from the free-throw line. Sean Sellers added 11 points, and Calhoun had 10 points and nine rebounds.
Central Michigan moved into a first-place tie in the West with the Cardinals by winning back-to-back road games at Toledo and Ball State.
The Chippewas finish the regular season at home Friday against arch-rival Western Michigan.
Ball State wraps up the regular season at 7 p.m. Friday at Northern Illinois on the CBS Sports Network. The Cardinals can still secure one of four first-round byes in the MAC Tournament with a win at NIU and a loss by either Central Michigan, Kent State or Ohio.
