They only scored a total of five points, but Jason Singleton and George Reese were Ohio State’s MVPs in its 59-49 win over Northwestern on Saturday.The pair held Northwestern’s conference player of the year candidate, center Evan Eschmeyer, to 10 points, half of his average.”I don’t know if you could look at the stats sheet and see someone who goes 1 for 1 in 37 minutes and someone else who goes 0 for 3 in 22 minutes and think that they were the stars of the game,” OSU coach Jim O’Brien said of Singleton and Reese. “Both of those guys were undersized all day against Eschmeyer and I think that they did a great job of battling that guy from the beginning to the end. They deserve an awful lot of credit for that.”Singleton and Reese were called upon to defend the 6-foot-11 Eschmeyer when OSU center Ken Johnson picked up his second foul with 12:18 left in the first half.”It’s like leaning on a redwood tree,” Reese said of guarding Eschmeyer. “One person can’t do it. Jason and I are kind of quick, we’re not as big as he is, but we’re quick, so we had to just move our feet. I think he has the best technique of any big man in the Big Ten.”O’Brien said that the key to their success in defending Eschmeyer was limiting his field goal attempts.”When you consider the fact that Eschmeyer only took five shots for the entire game, I think that speaks to how well we guarded him,” he said.Reese said that Eschmeyer was frustrated by his inability to get an open look at the basket. “You can tell when people start getting frustrated because they start throwing elbows,” said Reese, who now has first-hand knowledge of Eschmeyer’s elbow-throwing technique.Eschmeyer eventually fouled out with 52 seconds left in the game.Guard Neshaun Coleman admitted that OSU might have been too concerned with containing Eschmeyer, who averages a double-double, in the first half while failing to take note of Northwestern’s guards who went 5 of 10 from three-point land.”We were just trying to not let [Eschmeyer] overpower Kenny (Johnson) because we didn’t want him to get into foul trouble,” he said. “We’re small when he goes out of the game.”Jason helped Kenny out and we held [Eschmeyer] to two points in the half, but their guards really stepped up for them.”Coleman scored all but two of his season-high 16 points in the second half, including his own seven point run to give the Buckeyes a 10-point lead with 6:58 remaining. He was often left open after Northwestern’s guards abandoned him to double team OSU guards Michael Redd and Scoonie Penn.”Neshaun Coleman did a great job,” said Redd, who finished with 13 points and six rebounds. “We needed him today because teams collapse on Scoonie and me. He shot the ball really well.”OSU took the lead at the start of the game and held onto it until a three-pointer by Northwestern guard Steve Lepore put the Wildcats ahead 23-22 at halftime.After showing some signs of pulling away, the Buckeyes started missing some easy baskets. Following a Penn three-pointer at the nine minute mark in the first half, the team recorded only one field goal in the next 11 minutes, a drought that Penn himself ended with a layup two minutes into the second half. Northwestern, whose scoring defense is second in the Big Ten, held OSU, the conference leader in scoring offense at 75.8 points per game, to its lowest output of the season.Following its failure to shut down the Wildcats’ guards, OSU emerged from halftime with orders from O’Brien to put more pressure on the ball. The team forced Northwestern into a season-high 26 turnovers. O’Brien was pleased with the Buckeyes’ defensive effort, especially with regards to Eschmeyer.”The bottom line for us this season has been our defense,” he said. O’Brien is happy that seniors Singleton and Coleman are finally receiving their just desserts.”I think that anybody who has followed our program these last couple of years can feel nothing but joy for those guys who have been beaten down for three years being able to leave here knowing that they’re going to go to the [NCAA] tournament and are making some major contributions in their senior seasons.”