The unofficial online home for fans of the Kent State University Golden Flashes. Part of Collegiate Sports Nation (CSN).

Missed foul shots and turnovers. All you need to know. Oh, did I forget the MAC player of the year only playing 2 minutes during the last 10 minutes due to foul trouble. Yikes.

We were 8-17 from the line (including a few missed front ends of one and one's) and had 15 turnovers. BSU was 23-28 from the line with only 8 turnovers. That, Flash Fans, is not a recipe for success on the road in the MAC.

Patiently awaiting Axeme's game report. Would like some 'good' news from an otherwise disappointing night listening to it on the radio.

Coming soon. Meetings. Busy.
Simply--the best team on the floor did not win the game, FT's and TO's notwithstanding.

axeme Wrote:FT's and TO's notwithstanding.

You just nailed one of the biggest differences from last year to this year. FTs are ugly and TOs are killing them.

Painful trip.
(Great food @ Scotty's Brew House, though! )

If there were a half dozen Flash fans there, I didn't see all of them.
There was a little, and I mean little, response for Kent baskets, but I couldn't be sure if they were Kent fans or just a couple fo people rooting against BSU. I did see one gold sweatshirt across the way, but when I saw it clearly, it had "Ball State" on it.
I was a lonely gold guy in a sea of red. (Actually, my wife and daughter were with me.)
My wife doesn't follow sports at all, but she asked me several times: "How come the red guys run into the blue guys and they call the foul on the blue guys, and when the blue guys run into the red guys, they call the foul on the blue guys?
The answer: a guy named Mark Masariu.
The other two refs were actually decent--Randy Drury is a big time official and Eugene Crawford did a good job, I thought. But Masariu was making calls from 40 feet away constantly, and they were mostly O-fouls on us.

This is not a diatribe against the refereeing, which is never great, but this guy did take AG out of the game with two especially bad O-fouls--though I've got to give the BSU guy credit on the last one. Forget who it was--they switched Echols off Gates onto Haut's man and Hauts man guarded AG, who posted up high. AG hadn't even made a move when this guy went flying backwards--stunning flop, really! Fifth foul. Even the crowd around me laughed and rolled their eyes at that one as they gave each other high 5's, and the defender got up with a wicked grin. He's a hero now. 3-4 calls at crucial times killled our mementum each time.
Give BSU some credit: they have a couple of excellent scorers--McCoolum played well, Williams, not as much but he got his points at the line.
We really dominated play for most of the game when the clock was running. Beat them on the boards, shot OK, go a lot of easy looks inside, Gates was completely dominant--no one could defend him at all. Had he played his usual 34-35 minutes we would have won easily I think. He just hardly played in the second half.

All that said, we had a chance to make a statement: win a game down the stretch without ANtonio in the lineup. That would have been a huge confidence builder going into the home stretch of the season. But we didn't.
Missed the key shots at the end (behind because besides Haut, we were 1-9!!! at the line.) We didn't take care of the ball as well as we might, but we've been winning with the same formula--last night it caught up with us. Plus, we were terrible shooting 3's again.
We wasted a good effort by John, too. He was very effective on both ends!
I'm not disheartened by this loss--there wasn't much that separated it from being a 10 point road win, amazingly. We were the better team on the floor last night, clearly, but that doens't alwasy mean you win the game, as we know too well recently.
Fact is, though, we have to win out, now. But we play the last four teams in the East 5 games plus the BB next Saturday. And even if we lose one--we still have what I think is the best balanced and deepest team in the league and we should run the Gund anyway and make all this at-large crap moot.

Should be plenty fired up for Saturday--time to go into the Convo guns blazing! I know Christian and Antonio were disgusted by the refs last night--I haven't seen either one as angry as they were in the last few minutes of the game. More fuel for Saturday.
:mad:

Nice first hand report, axeme. Thanks! Now who's gonna report live and direct from Athens come Saturday?

Quite frankly, I think we were due to lose a game or two, like Ball and NIU, because we've flirted with these symptoms (FT%, TO's, etc.) all year. It's not something any of us like, but let's hope Coach and Crew can use it as a stepping stone to a strong finish.

Kudos to whomever - I'm too lazy to look :) - raised the point recently about us not giving enough time to some of the bench crew to give Haut and Gates a blow. A couple additional minutes in each half might help keep us from the foul trouble recently experience from the BG game to present. Bedford has been a stabilizer, but I'm a little disappointed that Brown hasn't earned more time.

It's always interesting to read an opponent's perspective of a game. I am a Ball State fan and, as you might expect, I have a little different take on last night's game. I'm not at all sure that the best team did not win last night. Ball State seemed to want the game more, they hustled after every loose ball and they hawked Haut and the other guards on the outside. The plan was to basically give Gates his points but to shut down the others, especially Haut. It looks to me like they did precisely that. Haut didn't shoot well, but in deference to the Ball State defense, nearly all his shots were contested. Edwards played very well. We didn't appear to have an answer for him. But Gates didn't play smart. After you get two or three offensive charge calls, a smart player would quit trying to force his way to the basket. I thought the first 4 calls against him were all correct. He has a tendency to attempt to clear his path to the basket by bumping the man guarding him with either his butt or his arm or lowering his shoulder into the defender as he makes his move. He got away with it several times in the first half, but the officials called him on it in the 2nd half. The 5th foul probably would not have been called in the 1st half, but after he had been whistled for the bumps on two very recent occasions, he should have known not to try it a 3rd time. It was a very good game. Ball State took better care of the ball and made better decisions with the ball than Kent did for the most part. And of course, you can't expect to win, especially on the road, when you shoot less than 50% from the free throw line. I look forward to another meeting with the Flashes if the two teams play again in Cleveland. Ball State and Kent State have been the class of the MAC in basketball for the past 12-15 years.

Fair enough, LTF, though if the last wrong call is not made, it's a much different ending, no matter who wins. The one ref did what he should not do: take the game away from the players at the end. Gates was on a 30 pt. pace and it simply was not an offensive foul. That the ref called it does not make one of the smarter players in the league,"not smart", it makes a ref "inept." Also, if you are going to call offensive fouls like they did, then you can't let the defensive man make the constant pushing, leaning contact. That's not going to happen, but you can't penalize Gates because he's bigger, stronger, smoother, and/or quicker (pick any 2, sometimes all, depending on the defender). This is college basketball, after all.
That said, it was not all about the one ref, who is always very bad nomatter whose side you are on--even with that we should have won the game if we sink our free throws at not even our normal avg. We made 1 in the first couple of minutes and after that, only Haut made any. Disgraceful.
I want to take nothing away from Ball St.--great program for years and you guys played a great game, took advantage of what was there, got the "W" and that's what you have to do. You are on a nice run right now. Hope you keep it up.
What pisses us off is not that we lost to you guys specifically, it's how it affects us nationally. This just happens to be a (another) year when we our biggest concerns are not just the MAC infighting, but trying to get a decent seed, maybe an at-large in the Big D. BSU, of all the other schools in the MAC, probably understands what I 'm talking about here. There are losses, then there are losses that you really regret.
I don't mind when we just get beat by a team and deserve it, like the embarrassing loss to a very hot NIU at home last Sat., but when one gets taken away you feel you should have won, it stings a little bit more. As KSU fans talking among KSU fans, we hope it motivates the team to not let games get into situations where a bad call like that can affect a game because of stupid careless stuff earlier in the game.
Good luck to you guys!

I think we have to remember that this team has been playing a TON of games over the past couple weeks and they are tired. Even the best teams get tired. Considering this team is also young......we may be seeing them wear down. Here's hoping they find their second wind. Next year they'll be better able to deal with this amount of work load.