Remaining regular season schedule
Sat., Feb. 13 -- at Kent State (4-17, 1-10 MAC)
Wed., Feb. 17 -- at Northern Illinois (10-12, 3-8 MAC)
Sat., Feb. 20 -- vs Western Michigan (14-10, 6-6 MAC)
Wed., Feb. 24 -- at Central Michigan (16-7, 10-2 MAC)
Sat., Feb. 27 -- at Eastern Michigan (14-8, 5-6 MAC)
Wed., March 2 -- vs Northern Illinois
Sat., March 5 -- at Toledo (13-9, 8-3 MAC)
"I’ll have to watch it, but what I’m afraid of is the lessons that we would talk about off this film are effort-related, want-to-related," he said. "I don’t know that there’s a coach out there good enough to coach those two things. You’ve gotta have it. The head-scratching part of this is we’ve had that all year."
Ball State trailed Central Michigan at halftime, 33-27 and the Chippewas pulled away in the third quarter by outscoring the Cardinals 22-14.
Senior guard Nathalie Fontaine said she was expecting a tighter game.
"I honestly thought in halftime that we were gonna come out and play better like we have in the past," she said. "It didn’t happen until too late, the hole was too deep."
Fontaine scored 29 points and hauled in 14 rebounds, but Sallee said "the one man show over here wasn’t quite enough tonight."
Sallee said his team should have been more prepared for Central Michigan's energy.
"We’ve played enough good teams, we should know that," he said. "And that was the part I was disappointed about … we had a lot of the same things happen to us over and over and over. That’s the part that I wonder where the effort was that we’ve seen and come to expect from the team."
Fontaine said the Cardinals crashed early in the game.
"I didn’t notice anything before the game," she said. "When the game started though … [Central Michigan] hit some early shots, and it just went downhill from there, really."
With five road games in Ball State's final seven regular season games, Sallee said his concerns about effort are especially troubling.
"If we lack effort on the road, we’ll get beat — plain and simple," he said. "It doesn’t matter who we play. It all starts and stops right there. If we’ll play, and we’ll play with effort and that tenacity this team has done all year, we can beat anybody. We showed tonight, that when we don’t play like that, we’re pretty pedestrian."
Ball State is tied for second in the MAC West with Toledo (13-9, 8-3 MAC) and are just one and a half games behind Central Michigan in the standings.
Sallee said the Cardinals still control their own destiny.
"It’s up to us whether this becomes a blip on the radar," he said. "We’ve got the whole West Division left, and Northern [Illinois] twice, so a lot of those teams that we’re jockeying with, they’re all in front of us."
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