Jack’s Take: Indiana’s Win Over Iowa Boosts Chances of Hosting NCAA Tournament Game

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Indiana’s best win of the season came at the perfect time and on the biggest stage.

In front of a sellout, whiteout crowd at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall, which revved up its noise level to among the highest in recent seasons, No. 14 Indiana defeated No. 4 Iowa 86-69 Thursday night.

Coach Teri Moren and the Hoosiers were coming off a disheartening 86-66 loss Monday at Illinois, a middle-of-the-pack Big Ten team at 13-12 and 7-8. That marked the third-most points Indiana had given up all season and just the second time all year its opponent shot above 50% from the field.

It would require quite a turnaround to stifle an Iowa offense that entered the game averaging 92.7 points per game, the most in the country. After the loss, Moren said, the Hoosiers had a players-only meeting Monday night when they got back to Bloomington, before even watching the film. Preparation days in anticipation of Iowa were some of their best all season.

“We talk a lot about it's not what happens to you, it's how you respond to what happens to you,” Moren said Thursday. “This is a group that's connected, and they're mature. They're competitive, and they care about each other. So I'm not surprised. You could just see it brewing in the last two days of practice.”

Indiana seniors Sara Scalia and Mackenzie Holmes were the stars, combining for 49 points on an efficient 18-for-38 shooting night. Scalia scored the Hoosiers’ first five points, and a pair of 3-pointers in the first five minutes ignited the crowd. Holmes helped seal the win, using perfect touch around the basket to go 5-for-5 in the fourth quarter.

The sport’s all-time leading scorer, Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, still put up a gaudy stat line of 24 points, 10 rebounds and nine assists, but somehow that’s an off night for her. She shot 8-for-26 from the field, 3-for-16 from 3-point range, 5-for-8 at the free throw line and committed five turnovers.

The Hoosiers’ defensive commitment and physicality on Clark was evident from the opening tip. The primary defender constantly stayed close to Clark, while help defenders stayed a bit longer than usual to keep her uncomfortable. They mixed in a zone defense at times and face-guarded Clark on dead-ball out of bounds situations to try to keep the ball out of her hands. Perhaps equally important, Indiana’s defense limited Iowa’s supporting cast to nine fewer combined points than the first matchup.

"I think being physical, face guarding me, denying the ball, threw a lot of different people at me,” Clark said. “Yeah, just very physical. I think that was the main thing. Kinda pushed me off my spots, got me out a little deeper than I wanted to be. Threw a little box-and-1 at us. Other than that, played mostly man-to-man.”

The NCAA women’s basketball committee released its first top-16 rankings on Feb. 15, offering a look into which teams would earn the top four seeds had the tournament begun that day. Being seeded one through four is especially important in women’s college basketball, because those teams host the Round of 64 and Round of 32.

Indiana came in at No. 15 in the initial rankings, but Monday’s loss at Illinois likely put the Hoosiers on the outside looking in. Beating the nation’s fourth-ranked team is huge at any point of the season, but the timing made it especially notable for Indiana.

The Hoosiers boast a 22-4 overall record and a 13-3 mark in the Big Ten, one game behind Iowa and two behind Ohio State in the loss column. They had good wins over teams like Tennessee, Princeton, Nebraska and Michigan State, but they still needed a signature win. They got one Thursday against Iowa.

Friday morning, Indiana moved back up to a No. 4 seed in ESPN’s bracketology. Moren sensed postgame the importance of this resume-boosting win in late February, though it can’t stop now.

“We certainly had to have this win,” Moren said. “I try not to look too far ahead to any of that stuff, but I knew we were part of it. After you lose a game like Illinois, you think, 'Oh, wow, our backs are against the wall. We gotta get that one on Thursday.' But we've got to also finish on the road at Northwestern. We've got to finish at home against a Maryland team that always seems like they start to figure things out in February and March. And then we've got to start the next season, which is the Big Ten conference tournament. So we still have our work cut out for us, but tonight I thought was a step in the right direction to secure that for our fans here in Bloomington."

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