This Is How Close Miami Came To Tying Northern Illinois

A bad team is bound to win eventually, games are not played on paper, blah blah blah. What happened here is the worst MAC West team beat the worst MAC East team at home by three points, fair and square. They could have gone to overtimehad Miami's Jon Harris fired this 3-pointer about a half-second later — probably more than that. The shot was nearly from halfcourt, banked off the backboard and in, but the replay showed an obvious tale of clock vs. ball touching.

There's no controversy. It wasn't a basket in regulation. Cool that he made it, though.

Northern Illinois won this game because they never fell behind, except for that one time when they fell behind by 10, but it was a brief setback rather than a harbinger for the outcome. I guess that's important. Every team falls behind — lots of winners tonight were at one point down by a handful of baskets. So it was a great comeback by Northern Illinois and they also did some excellent rebounding, overwhelming MU by a 34-24 mark and 16-8 on offensive boards. Tyler Storm finished with 17 points overall and Aksel Bolin had 10 of his 12 points in the second half.

Harris and Julian Mavunga both finished with 15, and Harris almost had 18 points, which meant a lot of other points and box score lines would be different than they are today.

We are now in a world where NIU is not dead-last. They currently inhabit the 11th spot in the MAC standings by virtue of being tied with CMU, but winning the head-to-head tiebreaker. Miami falls all the way down to 3-7, will not have a winning record against the West this year, and are in danger of not even hosting a first-rounder this year.