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Preview: Ohio University

The Bonnies have really struggled to win in Athens. Here's to hoping Saturday can bring a W and a 6-1 record for the Bonnies.

The Bonnies have really struggled to win in Athens. Here’s to hoping Saturday can bring a W and a 6-1 record for the Bonnies.

We’ve found a nice video preview of the Ohio game for your viewing pleasure. Feel free to visit their fan message board at the link listed below the video…be kind. The Bobcats are just 2-2 with losses against Florida Gulf Coast and Belmont. They’ve beaten App State and Arkansas Pine-Bluff. This is an experienced team who should compete to win their division of the MAC…Ohio has three players scoring in double figures right now and are led by Javarez Willis who is scoring 19.3 points a night on 53% shooting and 38% shooting from three. He scored 25 points on 5-13 shooting from three in their lose to Belmont on Saturday. Ohio is a poor shooting team from 3PT (27%) but have done an exceptional job on the glass thus far (30.3/ 10th in the county). The sample sizes are small but this will certainly be a nice test for the Brown and White. It would be great for this young, inexperienced team to win a road game such as this right off the bat and get to 6-1 heading into Pitt. In order for the Bonnies to win they’ll have to continue to take care of the ball, defend well (as we have been) and stick with being committed to going inside as our first option on offense. If we pound it to Ndoye/Wright inside and they are scoring at a decent clip we will be in this game. If we abandon the post game and start forcing wild shots and bad three pointers we will put ourselves behind early. I’m really hoping for another big game out of our front-court and waiting for our guards to have one of those games where they just get hot and go off (much like Siena did to us). If we have our front-court going and got Posley/Jay Adams and company to can a high percentage of threes we’d be in great shape given our consistent defensive efforts so far.

Finally, as Vinny stated yesterday, we will have a really, really hard time winning this game if we shoot it poorly at the foul line. Winning on the road against good teams requires a lot of things to go right; such will be the case Saturday afternoon in Athens.

Ohio has given us tough games over the past few seasons and their arena is no picnic to play in. The Bonnies will likely be a small underdog in their first true road game of the season.

A Nolan Flashback: Played there in December of 2007. Solomon decided to bench point guard Isiah Carson last minute for being late for a team meal and instead started walk-on Perry King who scored two points but promptly missed a wide open fast-break dunk to start the game off. We lost by 19 and got blown out in the second half. Mike Lee led SBU in scoring with 17. Your man Tyler Benson scored nine off the pine and the Bobcats shot a ridiculous 60% from the field and out rebounded us 33-14. Life under Slo….

Link to their fan boards:

http://www.bobcatattack.com/messageboard/topic.asp?FromPage=1&ForumPID=1&PID=162706

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A member of the class of 2008, Nolan spent four years as a student assistant with the program. He has written professionally for such outlets as espn.com/insider, Athlon Sports Magazines, Cox Sports Online and Blue Ribbon Previews. Ian was named one of the “140 Personalities to Follow in College Basketball” on twitter by The Sporting News.