Cincinnati Bearcats Basketball Storylines, Betting Odds: Tarleton State Texans

CINCINNATI — The Cincinnati Bearcats are ready to bounce back on Monday night against Tarleton State following the horrendous loss to Eastern Michigan last Wednesday night. UC drops into the game as 16.5-point betting favorites with a point total sitting at 146.5.

UC enters the game 5-2 overall and just 2-5 against the spread this season, while Tarleton is 5-3 straight up and 5-1 against the spread. The Texans can beat UC tonight, especially if the Bearcats keep playing sleepy hoop like they have been basically all season.

The Texans are 193rd on KenPom, while the Bearcats are 72nd. ESPN's Matchup Predictor gives Cincinnati a 96.3% chance to win the game and enter the Crosstown Shootout at 6-2 overall. UC is hoping to have leading-scorer Baba Miller and rotation piece Jalen Celestine back on the floor for this game after they missed Wednesday's loss with lower-body injuries.

UPDATE: Miller and Celestine warmed up before the game and are available to return on Monday night.

Eastern Michigan was one of the three negatively-rated teams on Sport Reference's Simple Rating System to ever beat Cincinnati. TSU is just over the positive threshold entering this game. The two schools have never matched up, with TSU entering Division 1 in 2020.

“I’m very disappointed," UC head coach Wes Miller said after the EMU loss. "Adversity struck not the way we wanted it to, but now we have to handle it the right way. That means that we can’t accept it, we have to learn from it, and we have to become a better team because of it. That will be our approach moving forward.”

Dying By The Three, Hello Dior

The Bearcats' heavy pace and three-point diet will bring a higher ceiling if they ever start hitting these shots at a consistent rate, but it bit them badly last Wednesday (7-29 from deep, just 19 points off 17 EMU turnovers). They currently have the 215th-ranked adjusted offense in the country on KenPom, which is UC's worst mark in the history of KenPom.

Day Day Thomas (51.4% from deep) is the only palatable shooter so far this season, and that has to change quickly, or it's going to be near impossible to win in these upcoming non-home environments. UC is shooting 29.9% from deep (303rd) and taking just 31.4 twos per game (308th). They are basically dead on arrival offensively without these shots falling.

No Miller has meant no interior penetration with live dribbles and a ton of action outside the three-point arc. Leading front count man Moustapha Thiam only took five shots in an understandably shaky early outing in his UC tenure, but the Bearcats need him to be as consistent as possible amidst these front-court injury storms. There are not many other ways to attack the rim consistently without him being effective.

Even with the pace-up approach, that evaporated when things got hard offensively on Wednesday and went back to the same stagnant UC offense we are used to seeing.

"They had a belief. We felt like we were playing from behind. We didn’t shoot it well. We got very stagnant offensively," Wes Miller said about the EMU loss. "Now all of a sudden there is a lead, and we are pressing, the zone bothered the lineups we had to play with on the floor tonight. We haven't played offense with a lot of the lineups we were playing tonight. It’s not an excuse, but we are trying to run action and get people in positions they have never been in, and we had a lot of busted possessions tonight.”

TSU will gladly try to slow this game down as EMU did and be willing to foul instead of give up high-percentage shots. The Texans only allow 54.6 shots per game (41st), but foul at a massive rate (20.9 per game, 333rd, 26.8 FT attempts allowed per game, 347th). The Bearcats just hit a season high from the stripe last Wednesday and have to be good there again, or things could get hairy fast.

That's especially true if Dior Johnson (23.6 points per game on a whopping 62.4% effective field goal rate) gets rolling around the rim like he has all season. The nation's second-leading scorer will have his hands full against Cincinnati's 15th-rated two-point defense, and it will have to be as strong as ever to not leave this result ever in doubt.

The 6-3 junior guard is a maestro at slicing into defenses and is liable to drop 30 points or more tonight. He's played 30-plus minutes in four of the past five games and had 29-plus points in each. Cincinnati has to start faster and show they want to play a complete 40 minutes sooner rather than later, or there's no reason to think this team will be any different than the other four Miller outfits to miss the NCAA Tournament.

The game tips off at 7 p.m. ET on ESPN+.

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