For Ohio State, the game started exactly as it was supposed to. The No. 6 team in the country rolled into the Carrier Dome and doubled Syracuse’s score in the game’s first 12 minutes.

The Buckeyes’ All-American center Jantel Lavender had six quick points. Point guard Samantha Prahalis who leads the nation in assists at 10.5 per game had already tallied six.

OSU held a 10-point advantage at the 7:27 mark of the first half and appeared well on its way to an eighth straight win.

But then the Buckeyes began to settle.

‘I think that we were complacent once we got a 10-point lead,’ Lavender said. ‘We just weren’t making enough of an effort to get defensive stops.’

Syracuse exploited that lack of defensive effort with a 16-0 run in the final 10 minutes of the first half. Having never led, the Orange made seven consecutive shots in a span of 3:31 to change the entire complexion of the game. SU never trailed from that point and knocked off the Buckeyes 75-66 in the Carrier Dome.

Prior to that tear, the Orange shot just 6-of-21 from the field to open the game. Kayla Alexander, SU’s center and leading scorer, picked up two quick fouls and was relegated to the bench. Things looked bleak for SU head coach Quentin Hillsman and his team.

‘That’s how we play,’ Hillsman said. ‘We kind of get down 10 or 12 points and then make a run and tie games.’

And the run was nothing short of perfection from the Orange. Seven straight makes from the field by four different players. It featured a pair of 3-pointers from Elashier Hall, four points from Erica Morrow, a jumper from Carmen Tyson-Thomas and four points from redshirt freshman Shakeya Leary Alexander’s replacement.

At the media timeout with 4:41 remaining, the crowd gave the Orange a standing ovation after SU took its first lead of the game. In all, the Buckeyes were held scoreless for more than five minutes of play.

‘I just think they started making shots,’ Ohio State head coach Jim Foster said. ‘They were getting shots early in the first half, they just weren’t going in. When their shots started to fall, we were still playing the way we were playing which was not a good way.’

Feeding of the momentum from that run, the Orange took a seven-point advantage into halftime. It marked the first time all season that Ohio State faced a deficit after 20 minutes of play.

The lead allowed Hillsman’s team to dictate the tempo of play in the second half. Syracuse had no problem with long, drawn-out possessions that ran the clock. The more time the Orange used, the less was left with the Buckeyes for a possible comeback.

‘We always talk about basketball is a game of runs,’ Hillsman said. ‘And we knew they were going to make a run. … (I thought) let’s just get some cushion so that down the stretch we can control the tempo and put the ball in our hands and win the basketball game.’

Controlling that tempo meant lulling the Buckeyes to sleep with the 2-3 zone defense. As the minutes started to tick away in the second half, Ohio State’s players began to settle for perimeter jump shots.

A team that averaged 14 3-point attempts per game was sucked into 17 attempts in the second half alone. For the game, OSU shot 8-for-30 from long range.

Ultimately, the Buckeyes couldn’t muster enough quality looks to dig itself out of the hole. The one time Ohio State tied the game 56-56 with 8:34 to go, the Orange responded just like it did in the first half. Five straight points pushed the game back in SU’s favor on the way to an upset.

‘We stayed in that ‘not real sharp ball movement, let’s just take a 3′ (mindset), whereas they were trying to work towards something,’ Foster said. ‘I thought they played a lot harder than we did.’

But perhaps the most impressive thing about the Orange’s first-half surge was that it came with Alexander on the bench. The team’s best interior scorer and current Big East Player of the Week could only watch as her teammates rallied to get the win.

They picked her up, and Alexander said she couldn’t have been happier.

‘I was celebrating,’ she said. ‘I was cheering my head off.’

mjcohe02@syr.edu

Published on December 11, 2010 at 12:00 pm

Contact Michael: mjcohe02@syr.edu | @Michael_Cohen13