Down by 10 points and with limited time to catch up, George Mason coach Jim Larranaga figured his team’s best chance of climbing back into Saturday’s BracketBuster game was to foul Ohio guard Michael Allen.
Allen came in to the game with the worst free throw average of the six Bobcats who average more than 20 minutes of playing time a game at 54 percent, and it seemed like a logical strategy.
So the Patriots fouled Allen three times in the final two minutes of the game, but he didn’t exactly comply with their plan.
“We didn’t want to keep trading baskets and I elected to try and foul them,” Larranaga said. “And Mike Allen — who’s only a 54 percent free throw shooter — goes and hits almost all of his free throws.”
Allen went 4 of 6 from the line as the game wound down, helping to eliminate any possibility of a George Mason comeback.
Although Allen’s free throw success rate is still the third worst on the team — ahead of Asown Sayles and DeVaughn Washington — at 56.8 percent, he wasn’t too concerned when the Patriots began to target him.
“I wasn’t surprised at all,” Allen said. “In a game like that you practically assume that they’re going to come after me because I have the worst number of the guys who were out there. But I’m at least a 50 percent shooter; they had to think I’d at least split them.”
Coach Tim O’Shea has talked to Allen several times in practice about making sure that his free throws aren’t a liability at the end of the game, but said he doesn’t have any reservations about leaving the Bobcats usual starting point guard on the court in a game’s waning moments.
“Mike’s very good under pressure,” O’Shea said. “He’s gotten to the point where I’m confident in him in that position. Granted, if he had missed four in a row, we would have taken him out, but he didn’t and that’s what matters.” Freeze frameIn what may become a new tradition, O Zone members froze at the 18:04 mark of the second half against George Mason, honoring the year Ohio University was founded. Fans and cheerleaders froze when the appropriate time hit and remained motionless as the next 30 seconds elapsed on the game clock, but not everyone in The Convo realized it.
“I’ll have to look for that,” O’Shea said. “I didn’t notice it before but that’s definitely unique. I love the O Zone and pretty much everything they think of to do. As long as they keep coming to games the way they do, I’m for anything that keeps the enthusiasm high.”
Freezing a moment in time during a basketball game was an idea that freshman art major Alison Quinn came up with for a class project, and the O Zone froze for the first time last week when the Bobcats hosted Bowling Green. The success of the moment prompted the students to do it again against the Patriots, and it’s possible it could become a regular part of each home game.
There are some kinks to work out of the freeze though, because when the O Zone came back to life against the Patriots, it cheered and the Bobcats had just turned the ball over.
Odds and ends The team took two days off after the win over George Mason. O’Shea said Ohio would resume normal practice Tuesday in preparation for its final Mid-American Conference road game of the season at Miami on Saturday.
There is only one MAC game this week — Western Michigan at Northern Illinois at 3 p.m. today — as schedulers tried to give teams the week after BracketBuster Saturday off to travel across the country, like Kent State did to play Saint Mary’s.
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