Under the Radar Game of the Day: Tuesday, February 24, 2015: Northern Illinois at Toledo

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Northern Illinois at Toledo, 7:00 PM Eastern, BCSN-TV/espn3

UPDATE: Due to a water main break, the game has been postponed to Wednesday night, 8:00 PM Eastern.

The Mid-American Conference invites all 12 of its member schools to its conference tournament.  However, the top two seeds get a triple-bye, all the way into the semifinal round.  Seeds 3 and 4 receive a double bye into the quarterfinal round, while the remaining eight teams have to win twice just to make the quarterfinals.  Therefore, order of finish within this conference is as important as any other conference in the country.  Entering play tonight, just four games away from the end of the regular season, six teams are within two games of each other for the top seed in the conference . . . meaning that two of these six teams will have to win five games to capture the automatic bid while two of them would have to win just twice.

One of the three teams tied for first place entering play tonight is the Toledo Rockets.  Toledo sits at 10-4 in conference (tied with Central Michigan and Kent State) and 18-9 overall.  Unfortunately for the Rockets, they are sitting on the wrong side of most tiebreakers at the moment having gotten swept by Kent State and losing their only game so far against CMU (the two teams will play again next week).  The good news is that Toledo gets a pair of home games this week while both CMU and Kent will have to head out on the road.  That makes sweeping this week’s games against Northern Illinois and Ball State imperative for the Rockets.  They will need strong efforts from Julius Brown, J.D. Weatherspoon and Justin Drummond to pick up these wins.

The first team with a shot at knocking off the Rockets this week is the Northern Illinois Huskies.  NIU sits at 4-10 in conference and 10-15 overall, with a strong probability that they will have to go on the road for their first round MAC tournament game (the first round is played at campus sites before all remaining teams head to Cleveland for the rest of the tournament).  NIU is only one win away from its second straight season with more than 10 victories — a major accomplishment given that the Huskies failed to record more than 10 wins in any season between 2007 and 2013.  Unfortunately for the Huskies, one of their top players, Darrell Bowie, has missed 8 games already this season with injuries and is questionable at best to play tonight.  The rest of the team will need to step up if they want to score the upset win in Toledo.