Cincinnati Bearcats Basketball Storylines: Mount St. Mary's

 Mount St. Mary's is next on the docket for the Cincinnati Bearcats Basketball team. The Bearcats welcome the Mountaineers for a 6 p.m. ET tip-off inside Fifth Third Arena on Sunday night.

This is another tune-up game for the Bearcats ahead of a massive Friday battle next week against 12th-ranked Louisville at Heritage Bank Center. Cincinnati is expected to win this game 96.9% of the time on ESPN's Matchup Predictor.

Cincinnati is currently ranked 39th on KenPom, and MSM is 278th. UC is trying to clean up its offense after giving up 24 turnovers, but still beating Dayton by double digits on Tuesday.

"It's a lot more fun to learn when you're winning," UC head coach Wes Miller said after the win. "We'd better take it seriously when we get back into the tape and get back to work as if we hadn't won the game. We've got a lot of work to do."

The Bearcats moved to 20-2 since the start of last season when leading at halftime.

Turnover Process

Cincinnati is trying to completely change its style of play this season, and it gets another chance to dial in its passing chemistry on Sunday. UC is averaging a whopping 18.3 turnovers per game, ranking 357th out of 365 D1 teams, but there's a clear reason for that: Pace.

Miller is trying to squeeze the juiciest possible results out of this reshaped roster that he and GM Corey Evans built to run. Cincinnati is up to 28th in adjusted tempo this season after ranking 262nd in that mark last season. Playing deliberate offense is not helping this program make the NCAA Tournament.

“This is exactly why most teams only talk about running in recruiting," Miller said about the early turnover problems. "I mean, everybody says they run in recruiting, I mean, everybody says we're going to play fast, and then they talk about it in the summer and their practices, and maybe a little bit into the fall, but when you get to it and it gets a little wacky out there, you want to kind of get back in control. And if we're ever going to be the kind of running team that I think we're going to be, we have to play through some stuff. Now, all these turnovers weren't because of our pace of play. Some of them were breaking the press, some of them were footwork turnovers, some of them were casual turnovers."

Now, if they approach 18-plus turnovers Sunday like they have in the past two games, then concern could start creeping in. MSM sports a mediocre defense (181st in adjusted efficiency) and only forces eight turnovers per game this season (359th). This is a great spot to get right, especially with a larger practice diet than teams normally get during two-game weeks.

Miller is also spot on with the deeper dive into those 24 turnovers against Dayton. The game was horribly officiated, and nearly half of them did not occur due to the pace.

Cincinnati is trying to post around 80 possessions per game this season, and they are right near that mark so far. Oh, and a top-three defense nationally should only improve as those issues get cleaned up.

“How fast we want to play is going to come with some growing pains, so we just got to get better as the season goes on," Kerr Kriisa said after the Dayton win. "It's November. We want to play our best basketball in February. The way we play right now, we've got to live with those mistakes where we're definitely going to improve on that and work on that as the season goes on.”

Dominant Defense

Sunday is a brutal, brutal matchup for the Mountaineers, who are bringing the 317th-ranked offense by adjusted efficiency into this one.

Enter a Cincinnati defense that's all the way up to second in defensive efficiency on KenPom. They rank just 53rd in points allowed, but shoot all the way up in the deeper metric because of that aforementioned pace. The goal should be a sub-60 point total from MSM, which only averages 63.3 points, despite facing the 227th most-difficult schedule so far.

There is no Mountaineer averaging over 12 points, so the hot scorer issue that has plagued Miller's teams shouldn't come into play here. 

All in all, there's nothing that should scare UC here on the defensive end of the floor. MSM's leading scorer is 6-10 Luke McEldon, but he's the only rotation player taller than 6-7. Cincinnati should be able to dominate the glass here, use those boards to elevate that pace, and roll by at least 30 points.

Being this strong defensively, despite all the live-ball turnovers that often lead to better scoring chances, is a great sign for the rest of this season.