Center Ousmane Cisse drives by the defender Saturday at Loyola. (Nora Maberry/Daily Eastern News)

Junior center Jake Byrne said Saturday he wasn’t 100 percent sure if Eastern is still in contention to make the Ohio Valley Conference Tournament.Good news for Byrne and his teammates: the Panthers still have a chance to make the tournament.But one complicated scenario has to work in Eastern’s favor. Eastern (9-19, 5-13 OVC), the tenth-place team in the OVC, plays Thursday at Jacksonville State and Saturday at Samford. The Panthers need to win those two games. A loss in either and Eastern is eliminated.Then, Morehead State, who is tied for seventh place with Tennessee State, needs to lose against Tennessee State and Austin Peay. Then, JSU must lose to Eastern on Thursday, and then defeat Southeast Missouri on Saturday.If this scenario plays out, Eastern would be in a three-way tie with JSU and Morehead State. The Panthers would win this three-way tiebreaker because it would have a 3-1 record against JSU and Morehead this year.A two-way tie between Morehead and Eastern would favor the Eagles because they beat first-place Austin Peay earlier this season. Eastern lost both times to the Governors this season. Martin collects another conference awardFreshman guard Romain Martin added another Ohio Valley Conference accolade to his collection.The freshman from Minneapolis earned his fifth OVC freshman of the week after Eastern went 1-1 in both games last week.Martin averaged 20 points in the two games, and scored 23 of the Panthers’ 43 points in Saturday’s loss at Loyola of Chicago.Martin leads the team in scoring (14.8 points) and if he finishes the season leading Eastern in scoring, he will be the first freshman to do so since Eastern joined Division I in the 1981-82 season.Byrne said having a scoring option like the 6-foot-3 guard helps ease the burden off the inside presence. “I like it because it takes the defense out more so because when they have to go out and guard the outside guys because of him, it leaves me open for Ousmane (Cisse), me and Justin (Brock) and some of the other guys,” he said.Robinson doesn’t fare well in Chicago areaEastern has played two times in Chicago this season, the hometown of starting point guard Mike Robinson. Those two times have produced lopsided losses for the Panthers (71-41 to DePaul and 66-43 to Loyola).Saturday, Robinson had his worst offensive output of the season, being held scoreless for the first time this year and missing all five of his field goal attempts.In the game against DePaul on Nov. 17, Robinson had a team-high 11 points, but also four turnovers.“It’s really been a bad experience,” Robinson said of coming to Chicago this season. Robinson said Loyola’s arena was farther away from his home in Chicago, but still said some of his past AAU coaches attended the game.Bulls assistant coach and player take in Saturday’s gameChicago Bulls forward Luol Deng and Bulls assistant coach Pete Myers took in Saturday’s game at the Gentile Center.Myers had a vested interest in the game, with his son Gino Myers-Kyles, on Eastern’s roster. Myers-Kyles played nine minutes and banked in a 3-pointer from the right wing for his only points in the game.Team looks toward next two gamesEastern struggled in almost every aspect of Saturday’s game, but the loss doesn’t diminish Eastern’s OVC postseason chances.Robinson said losing to a non-conference opponent is still the same when the Panthers lose to an OVC opponent.“When you play a team, it’s a team no matter what conference they’re in,” he said. “When we play Austin Peay or someone like that, we don’t see ‘OK, this is in the Ohio Valley Conference, we’re going to play hard.’ We just see another team in front of us on the schedule that we have to win.”But fellow guard Martin said the loss isn’t the same because it’s a non-conference opponent and not an OVC school.“It meant something but it kind of didn’t because we still got to make this conference tournament,” Martin said. “We’ve got two big, big games this Thursday and Saturday so it’s going to be a hard three days of practice. We’ve just got to come ready for the conference games.”Scoring goes down under MillerEastern head coach Mike Miller employs a different offensive style than his predecessor Rick Samuels. Miller’s teams rely on a triangle offense, with emphasis on an inside-outside combination.Samuels’ offense relied on a consistent motion offense, with various cuts and screens to find the open shooter.Through Miller’s first 55 games as the Panther head coach, his team has scored fewer than 50 points eight times, with the most recent being the 43 points Eastern scored Saturday against Loyola.In the 720 games Samuels coached, his teams scored fewer than 50 points 13 times. In the eight games under Miller scoring fewer than 50 points, Eastern has lost all eight.Under Samuels, his teams didn’t fare much better when scoring fewer than 50 points, compiling a 2-11 record in those games.

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