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By Bill Koch
GoBearcats.com
CINCINNATI - Zack Tobler, the University of Cincinnati's walk-on forward who usually sees playing time only in the closing minutes of a blowout win, doesn't go into every game trying to figure out if he'll get a chance to play.
But sometimes as the game unfolds Tobler will find himself trying to figure out when he might get on the floor. Saturday's game against Fairleigh Dickinson was one of those games.
"I never want to think about it too much because you never know how games will go," said Tobler, a Covington Catholic High School product. "But the way we were playing today and the way we came out, at the end of the first half I was thinking, man, maybe this is a game I might get in."
The 25th-ranked Bearcats rolled to a 119-68 victory over the Knights from Teaneck, N.J., before 7,017 fans at Fifth Third Arena, scoring the fifth-most points in school history and making 64.7 percent of their field goal attempts, tied for the fourth-highest percentage in school history.
They fell eight points short of matching the school record of 127 points set against North Texas State in 1957-58 during the Oscar Robertson era, but easily surpassed the 106 points that were the previous high for a UC team under Mick Cronin, who took over as the Bearcats' head coach in 2006. They were also a record for the most points scored by one team in an American Athletic Conference game.
Fairleigh Dickinson (2-9) has lost seven in a row. The Knights were picked to win the Northeast Conference by the league's coaches, but were totally overmatched against the Bearcats.
UC placed seven players in double figures, led by Kevin Johnson with 18 points, and shot 48 percent from 3-point range. And yes, Tobler did see substantial playing time, matching his career high with five points in six minutes. The Bearcats hit the 100-point mark on a Jarron Cumberland 3-pointer with 6:52 left and tied the Cronin era high of 106 points on Tobler's layup with 4:32 remaining.
As they usually do, Johnson said, the Bearcats prepared for FDU as if it were a Top 25 opponent, something Cronin said this team is very good at.
"It was just basically, don't underestimate our opponent," Johnson said when asked what the scouting report said about the Knights, "try to keep them out of the lane, basically what we do every day, smother them with defense. It's not necessarily about them. We've been stressing that it's more about us."
UC was leading, 12-11, with 15:39 to go in the first half before outscoring the Knights, 31-3, over the next eight minutes-plus to take a 43-14 lead, with the UC players doing pretty much whatever they wanted on offense.
By the end of the first half, UC had a 65-26 lead. Its first-half point total was the highest for a UC team since Feb. 5, 1998 when the Bearcats scored 68 against DePaul. They won that game, 109-73, at DePaul.
UC shot 67.6 percent in the first half, forced 15 turnovers, held FDU to 24.1 percent shooting, and just missed breaking the school record for points in a half of 69, also set in 1957-58 vs. North Texas State.
The highlight of the game for UC was a thunderous one-handed dunk by Jacob Evans off an alley-oop feed from Troy Caupain with 14:56 to play that had UC fans drooling.
"That's ESPN Top 10 right there," Johnson said. "That gets the juices flowing when I see stuff like that. (Evans) was replaying that in the locker room about five minutes ago."
The 51-point margin was easily the most lopsided blowout of the season for the Bearcats, but it was more than a spectacle for Cronin, who liked what he saw because of what he hopes it portends for the rest of the season.
"When you look at us statistically, shooting 48 percent from the field coming in today as a team but only shooting 30 from the 3-point line," Cronin said, "we're an unselfish team. We we pass the ball, but we just have not made open shots. That's really the truth of a lot of our games, even in some wins.
"It's been my feeling that if Kevin can get going and Jarron (Cumberland) can get going from the perimeter to join what Jacob Evans has been doing, with Kyle (Washington) and Gary (Clark) inside, we've got a chance to get a lot better and be a devastating team at times when we can shoot the ball. But you've got to make open shots. That's the name of the game and today we did that."
Cronin was also buoyed by UC's 50-plus deflections, well above the 40-deflection mark that almost always means victory for the Bearcats, and the 57 points his reserves scored, marking the second straight game in which they scored 50 or more.
"We still have a lot of room to improve," Cronin said, "but obviously we were hitting on all cylinders today. The more our bench guys can continue to get comfortable and confident and realize how important they are to this team, I think we've got a chance to really improve as the season goes on. Obviously the competition is going to get a lot steeper."
Bill Koch covered UC athletics for 27 years - 15 at The Cincinnati Post and 12 at The Cincinnati Enquirer - before joining the staff of GoBearcats.com in January, 2015.