Central Michigan University
Ball State
Chippewas Fall From MAC West Perch
2/13/2016 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Andy Sneddon, CMUChippewas.com
MOUNT PLEASANT, Mich. - Frustrating? Absolutely. Devastating? Probably not.
And certainly not if the Chippewas bounce back as they have shown a propensity to do.
The Central Michigan men's basketball team was outscored 17-5 down the stretch Saturday in falling to Ball State, 75-63, in an important Mid-American Conference game before 3,351 at McGuirk Arena.
"We get to wake up in the morning and go back at it again tomorrow at practice -- as long as we came out of the game healthy and can go to practice tomorrow," CMU senior Chris Fowler said. "So I'm going to wake up tomorrow and get better.
"Each game is its own separate entity and we will treat it as such. We'll go back to the drawing board and fix some of these things in order to start getting better tomorrow."
Bo Calhoun scored 22 points to lead the Cardinals, who dropped the Chippewas from the top spot in the MAC West. CMU is 13-12 overall, 6-6 league.
Ball State is 16-9, 7-5 and shares the top spot with Toledo. The Rockets (16-9, 7-5) visit McGuirk Arena on Tuesday.
The Cardinals are the surprise team of the MAC after winning just four league games in the previous two years. They have done - to this point, at least -- what CMU did a year ago, going from the basement to contender status.
"It wasn't too long that our fans were coming out to see these two teams battling for 11th place," CMU coach Keno Davis said. "It's nice to see both programs coming so far so that now we can compete not just in the league, but we can compete for championships.
"We look forward to using this game to help us get better because our ultimate goal is to be playing our best basketball for the conference tournament and hopefully we'll be doing just that."
Rayshawn Simmons scored 22 points, Fowler had 15 and John Simons added 11 points and a team-high seven rebounds for the Chippewas, who made 11 of their 27 3-point attempts (40.7 percent) but finished just 24-of-64 (37.5 percent) from the floor overall.
Ball State held CMU's leading scorer, Braylon Rayson, to just three points on 1-of-7 shooting. Rayson, who entered the game averaging 16.3 points per, was hobbled by an injury and left the game in the first half. He returned, but clearly was affected
"Braylon never looked himself out there and we don't want to use that as an excuse by any means," Davis said. "When we don't have Braylon on the court, we're not as good of a team.
"We're not quite as deep as we'd like to be and when Braylon is the leading scorer going into the night and isn't on the court or 100 percent, that's going to effect any team in the country that has a special player. It's unfortunate he wasn't able to contribute like he usually does."
Calhoun broke a 58-58 tie with two free throws with 3 minutes, 53 seconds remaining, triggering Ball State's game-clinching run. He scored nine of his points during the surge, going 5-for-5 from the free throw line. He finished the game a perfect 9-for-9 from the stripe. Ball State was 17-for-21 from the line, the Chippewas were just 4-of-7.
The Chippewas got aggressive throughout the second half in taking the ball to the basket, but the Cardinals' stiffened on defense and CMU didn't get the opportunities to get to the free throw line.
Just one of CMU's charity tosses came in the final 20 minutes.
"I felt that we were taking the ball to the basket and I don't think we were responding well to not getting the foul calls," Davis said. "I felt like we were doing what we needed to do, but we need to take a constructive look at what we can do to help us rather than focus on the negative aspects. It was a physical game that probably favored Ball State, but we have to figure out a way to win those physical games."
