Bubba Walther doesn’t like the way he’s been shooting the ball lately, and he makes no secret about it.

His shots haven’t fallen with the consistency he’d like them to, and in the Bobcats’ first Mid-American Conference game of the season the trend hadn’t changed.

Walther hit two 3-pointers with a minute remaining against Bowling Green Saturday, but he missed two attempts in the final six seconds to tie the game, leaving the Bobcats (9-5, 0-1 MAC) with a 52-49 loss to the only team in the East Division with a losing record.

“Struggling, especially as a senior, is the last thing I want to do,” Walther, who has shot 25 percent from the field in the past four games, said last Friday.

“While (my) shooting still bothers me a lot right now, I realized that my passing can help us,” Walther said. “If my shot’s not there, I need to just do what I can to set up everyone else.”

Walther piled up assists through the Bobcats’ non-conference schedule and is second on the team with 47 helpers — just 15 shy of his season total last year. In Ohio’s 53-47 win over Bucknell on Jan. 2 he had a career-high seven assists in arguably the team’s best defensive showing of the season.

Four of those seven assists were to Bert Whittington IV, who had 20 points against Bucknell and has been a significant part of the Bobcats’ added depth this season. Ohio has nine players seeing regular time, a luxury seldom available a season ago.

“The depth is tremendous,” forward Jerome Tillman said. “Last year guys would average 30-35 minutes night in and night out. Leon (Williams) would play all night long, I’d play all night long and we were just worn down at the end of games and then the season.”

The old and new players have jelled well, Tillman and Walther agreed, in part because of the success Ohio had against Maryland and at the Rainbow Classic in Honolulu, Hawaii. The Bobcats advanced to the tournament final before falling to Saint Mary’s 70-63.

But what both cautioned is that early-season success means little in the MAC.

“We’re in a good place at this point and after the non-conference schedule. Now the biggest thing is that we can’t beat ourselves,” Tillman said. “We can’t implode.”