Only two games separate the No. 1 team from the No. 5 team in the West Division of the Mid-American Conference. With five games left, a lot of jumbling around could take place in the divisions before the MAC Tournament in March, as each of the top five teams plays each other beforehand.
After falling to Toledo on Tuesday, the women's basketball team now sits in a three-way tie for first in the MAC West with Toledo and Western Michigan. Saturday the Cardinals (15-6, 9-2 MAC) travel to Marshall for a do-or-die matchup to stay in the hunt for the MAC West crown.
The Thundering Herd (3-7, 7-14) enters the game as one of the bottom teams in the East, but as the Cardinals and head coach Tracy Roller found out at Akron last weekend, even the bottom teams in the MAC are threatening to disrupt the power charts within the MAC.
The Toledo loss on Tuesday marked the fifth game in 11 days for the Cardinals. Roller said the team is more focused on itself than what Marshall is going to do.
"With all those games in a row, we didn't really have any time to focus on what we were doing," Roller said. "We've just been working on us and what we have to do to win."
For the past two years, Marshall has been the top rebounding team in the MAC, particularly on offense, and Roller said that in order for the Cardinals to be successful defensively, they are going to have to be effective rebounding the ball defensively to limit Marshall's second-chance opportunities.
"(Marshall's players) are not great shooters," Roller said, "so they've been ingrained to go get the ball. Players one through five, they all rebound, and we can't let them do it. "
Making matters more difficult, Marshall enters the game with one of the better defenses in the league. The defense is based around the athleticism of its player senior Ida Dotson, who is currently second in the MAC in rebound and third in blocks.
"They're a little bit more aggressive on the ball than we've seen this year," Roller said. "They are very athletic and will play up in your grill. We are just working on ripping the ball through and getting to the basket."
Throughout the year, the perimeter-oriented Cardinals have struggled against zone defenses and will likely see more against the Thundering Herd. But following the Toledo game, Roller said the Cardinals are improving on zone offense, and it should be less of a factor.
Instead, Roller said the success of the Cardinals will lie in the hands of the defense, an aspect at which Ball State is notoriously poor.
"I've had a big emphasis on defense lately," Roller said. "During that stretch of games, we were hitting shots so we won. It wasn't because of our defense.
"We are going to be more excited and more energetic about our defense. We rely so much on our offense for a spark. We are really going to have to have our defense get stops and get fired up because of it."
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