The Toledo Rockets are going to Cleveland Thursday to play Northern Illinois in the second round of the MAC Basketball Tournament, and they owe it all to another spirited defensive effort, this time against their arch rival, Bowling Green. Those Rockets came up big at home again, drubbing the Falcons 77-52, to end the visitor’s season at 9-21.

The plan for this game was to put continuous pressure on Bowling Green’s leading scorer, junior Martin Samarco and force him to work for every shot he took. “He’s such a great shooter, we wanted him to work for everything. If he was going to score 20 points, we wanted him to take 20 shots” said Toledo mentor Stan Joplin. “ We tried to keep a fresh guy on him. Sammy (Villegas) started out guarding him, then Justin Ingram was on him, then Ridley Johnson, and then Jonathan Amos.”

The plan worked well for Toledo, because Samarco, averaging 19.4 points in conference play, was held to 13 points in the contest, making good on just four-of-12 shooting attempts.

For Toledo, it was Justin Ingram who became the trigger-man in the UT offense, tallying a career-tying 23 points. Scoring in bunches, he recorded Toledo’s final eight points of the first half of the game, and hit two consecutive three-pointers to take the air out of Bowling Green’s basketball about five minutes in the second period, when it appeared that the Falcons might be gearing up for a run.

Ingram didn’t hurt his conference leading .867 free-throw percentage either, going 7-7 from the charity stripe.

Erik Marschall started things out right for Bowling Green when he got behind the Toledo defense for a pair of dunks, but a short jumper from Tino Valencia, immediately getting odds to be follow a Keonta Howell trey, soon had Toledo up by three, 8-5.