Allow me a moment for a conspiracy theory...
I'm still not sure JB wanted to win that game, for whatever reason. That was arguably our best zone of all time, which JB had to see after five minutes of practice. If he REALLY wanted to win, why wouldn't he switch to it in a tight game(they took the lead with 8 minutes to go in the game, plenty of time.) where they were hot from the outside, hurting us with backdoors and the quicker Ekperegin was exploiting AO(always struggled with smaller, quicker guys) and our bigs? Since when has he ever been hesitant to switch to zone?
We destroyed a majority of opponents, hit #1 in the country, were a 1 seed, could've won it all with AO, etc., that season and as I remember Lemoyne finished near the bottom of their D2 conference that year. Two weeks later(I think it was the UNC game), Bobby Knight was saying we were the best team in the country. I didn't think it at the time at all, but in hindsight, that team was a well oiled machine and I can't just chalk that loss up to 'they were hot, we weren't', let's be honest, we destroy that team if we go zone for even half the game.
We'll never know for sure but I think JB wanted to send the 'we can't play man defense' message while getting a potentially great team's collective attention that night in a test environment with little downside as even the media onslaught would only reinforce whatever his message was. And if true, it worked tremendously well.
