The numbers didn’t look pretty, but the result is just what the Bowling Green women’s basketball team was looking for this past Saturday when they took down Ohio 86-59.
Bowling Green committed 20 turnovers in the game and racked up 22 fouls. But matters were even worse for the Bobcats, who finished with 24 turnovers and 28 fouls.
But there is a reason for this trend to happen in this game.
Ohio is the kind of team that likes to run and the Falcons are the kind of team that is willing to run. Both like to put up points and both like to move the ball fast.
“That’s not surprising on our end,” BG head coach Curt Miller said. “They’re a team that presses for essentially 40 minutes.”
And that pressure led to mistakes for the Bobcats in the second half, as they racked up 17 of their fouls, watched BG sink 15 second half free throws, and watch three of their players go to the bench with their fifth foul.
None of those foul outs were more key for the Falcons than Kristian Kirkpatrick’s fifth. Kirkpatrick was Ohio’s leading scorer coming into the game, but with 17 minutes left she got her fifth foul with her sub waiting at the scorer’s table.
“Kirkpatrick fouling out early in the second half was a big factor,” Miller said. “You never know what kind of factor she would’ve been.”
Up to that point, Kirkpatrick played a strong game for the Bobcats, tallying eight points, six boards and a pair of steals.
For the Bobcats, playing with their leader would’ve been huge in the end.
“Would it make a difference if we win or lose, I don’t know,” Ohio head coach Lynn Bria said. “Would it have been closer? I think so.”
But in the end, it was the fundamentals of the game that won it for the Falcons rather than the mistakes that were made.
BG held a 55 to 37 edge rebounding for the game, and Bria feels that was the difference maker for the Falcons.
“Their rebounding was a huge key,” she said. “I felt like every time we crawled back and got it to single digits, they would come back with a huge rebound, and that was the name of the game.”
In the end, it wasn’t a pretty game on paper, but the results were beautiful for the Falcons.
