True show of hands please. How many people were really confident that Indiana would go into Iowa City Tuesday night and knock off the No. 16 Iowa Hawkeyes and win the outright Big Ten championship?
C’mon, tell the truth. How many of you really expected that to happen?
I’ll be honest. I didn’t really see it coming. I thought Indiana would win the outright Big Ten title this week but I expected the Hoosiers to do it at Assembly Hall against Maryland on Sunday where IU is 16-0 this season. I expected it to happen at what would be a Hoosier Lovefest on Yogi’s Senior Night. What I didn’t expect was the final outcome Tuesday night.
Indiana 81, Iowa 78.
The Hoosiers are outright Big Ten champs for the second time in four seasons. In the previous 19 seasons, Indiana had shared the Big Ten title once and that was in 2002 when IU went 11-5 and shared it with several teams in Mike Davis’s second season in Bloomington.
With 14 wins IU has now equaled the most wins by an IU team in close to forever. The 2013 team won 14 games. So did 2008, Kelvin Sampson’s final group before he was shown the door and team was hit with NCAA sanctions. The 1992 Hoosiers with Calbert Cheaney and company also won 14 games.
And IU has one game to play to reach that 15-win Big Ten plateau. The last time IU won 15 or more Big Ten games was 1993, the year Alan Henderson tore his ACL in practice before the Purdue game at a time when IU was 13-0. That year, the Hoosiers were 17-1 in the Big Ten.
But to say that I’m a little surprised that Indiana is sitting here today at 14-3 in the Big Ten and outright champs with one emotional game to be played on Sunday would be a huge understatement.
Tuesday night just seemed like the Perfect Storm set up in Iowa’s favor. Iowa was reeling and in a must-win situation in order to get its season back turned around. The Hawkeyes were playing at home where the crowd at Carver-Hawkeye would certainly be able to will Iowa to a crucial home victory, right?
It was Senior Night, an emotional night to send off four of its own including guys like Jarrod Uthoff, Anthony Clemons, Adam Woodbury and Mike Gesell, who by himself seems as if he’s been at Iowa about 10 seasons. It seems like Jess Settles all over again.
It was a national television audience and Iowa had a chance at revenge against an Indiana team that started Iowa on this bad streak it had been on over the past three weeks when the Hoosiers won on Feb. 11 at Assembly Hall.
This was expected to be the perfect payback for an Iowa team that needed to win to boost its national ranking, its potential seeds in both the Big Ten and upcoming NCAA Tournaments and get back on track toward at least sharing a conference title for the first time since 1979.
And it was playing an IU team that was essentially a man down with Robert Johnson missing his second game after injuring his ankle against Purdue. Often times a team can rally around the loss of player for that next game (in this case a road tilt last week at Illinois) but to have to make up for the loss of a starting guard for two games in a row was a tall order. And the first time the two teams had played Johnson had scored 11 points and knocked down three 3-pointers. He had been a solid contributor.
No, it just seemed like the deck was stacked against Indiana. When asked by my friends for a pregame prediction I said I thought Iowa would cover the 5-point spread and win by around 8. It just didn’t seem like a good matchup for the Hoosiers.
But take out the broom. Indiana swept Iowa. The Hoosiers will go down as the only Big Ten team that this group of Iowa seniors did not have a home victory against in their careers.
Indiana did it Tuesday night by defying all the odds. The Hoosiers really shot the ball well on the road for about 35 minutes including hitting one timely long range bomb after another. IU did it despite an almost overwhelming foul differential. I’d be interested in what non-IU fans watching that game as a unbiased observer felt about the foul disparity. To me it didn’t seem like IU got a fair shake and I’ll admit it’s nice to say that after a victory so it doesn’t like sour grapes. There were a couple of plays late that made absolutely no sense including Colin Hartman’s fifth foul and that drive to the basket by Yogi where he gets slapped on the arm but there’s no call. In many ways, it felt like the officials kind of got caught up in the wave of emotion inside of Carver-Hawkeye.
Again, it’s nice to be able to make those observations and not sound like sour grapes because the Hoosiers lost. And they did almost lose but found a way to overcome a couple of critical errors in the closing seconds. It didn’t hurt that Iowa missed 12 of its final 13 shots including the 3 at the buzzer to tie.
I still can’t believe that Yogi missed both of those free throws late (or that Thomas Bryant got the offensive rebound after the second miss). And I just expected more out of Max Bielfeldt than that lazy pass he through in the direction of Nick Zeisloft with IU protecting a 3-point lead with 6 seconds remaining.
Still, truly there were many more positives than negatives for Indiana in this one.
Now, Indiana will hold its collective breath until we find out the severity of Juwan Morgan’s shoulder injury. One thing positive on that front was the mention in the postgame that this was a recurring injury for Morgan. So at least it is something he has dealt with in the past. But man, the way he has played of late Indiana really needs him in the lineup at the very least in the Big Ten Tournament and beyond.
I still am curious though how many of you really saw that one coming Tuesday night? I’d like to see that show of hands for those who were really confident (not just wishful or hopeful but confident) that IU would come out of Carver-Hawkeye with the outright Big Ten title.
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