#2 Buffalo vs #7 Western Michigan: Preview and Game Thread

The #2 seed UB Women’s Basketball team opens the 2022 MAC Tournament on Wednesday, March 9, 2022 at approximately 4pm (ESPN+). They will face #7 seed Western Michigan.

The Bulls, with a record of 22–8 and 16–4 in the MAC, have been playing some of their best basketball of the season lately, scoring 79 or more points in their last five games, and have a seven game winning streak. Their front line has dominated lately, as all three front line players who get regular playing time, sixth year senior Summer Hemphill, senior forward Ade Adeyeye and junior forward Loren Christie, have been playing solid basketball, and the Bulls rack up huge number of points in the paint, and usually dominate the boards.

Buffalo played Western Michigan once during the regular season, on February 7, at Kalamazoo. In that game, which the Bulls won 71–64, Buffalo used only six players in the game (because of illness, injury and players not available for personal reasons), but still managed to hold off the Broncos. Now, with the Bulls at nearly full strength, the team looks a lot stronger than the one that defeated WMU in early February.

The MAC has announced that Buffalo freshman guard Georgia Woolley has been named MAC Freshman of the Year. Woolley leads all MAC freshman in scoring at 14.2 points per game, and has very good statistics in other categories. Woolley also made the all-Freshman team, and was also named third team All-MAC. In addition, junior guard Dyaisha Fair, who led the MAC in scoring, was named first-team All-MAC, and Hemphill was named second team All-MAC and to the All-Defensive team.

Akron’s Jordyn Dawson was named MAC Player of the Year, despite her scoring average of 22.4 points per game was lower than Fair’s 23.1. I speculate on why Fair didn’t win — the one weakness in Fair’s game is her shooting percentage is low. She finished the season shooting 39.8% while Dawson shot 44.3%. Lastly, the POY was a three-player race, with Ohio’s CeCe Hooks also in the running, and this potentially split the votes that any one player could receive.