Cyclones Rout Iowa in Ames
AMES, Iowa — The kiss was premature.
Jordan Bohannon made his first 3-pointer of the night, and then the Iowa guard turned to the Iowa State student section that he’s enjoyed antagonizing over the years and blew a quick kiss.
All it did was just turn up the volume on a night when the humidity of loathing that comes with this rivalry made this an uncomfortable Thursday at Hilton Coliseum.
It was only the beginning for the Hawkeyes. Iowa State’s defense, steamy with its suffocation all season, was about to blanket Iowa’s offense.
The result was a 73-53 win for the Cyclones, the program’s largest margin of victory for the series.
Iowa State (9-0), ranked 17th in the Associated Press poll, snapped a three-game losing streak in the series by holding the Hawkeyes (7-3) to 27 percent shooting and outrebounding them 50-32.
“Not a lot was happening tonight,” said Bohannon, who finished with a team-high 17 points but had to scramble for most of those on a night in which he made just 4-of-12 shots.
What the Cyclones did was what they’ve been doing to just about everyone else this season, and what no one, guard Izaiah Brockington said, has been doing to the Hawkeyes.
“They never really saw ball pressure like ours,” Brockington said. “They never saw intensity like ours. They were free to do whatever they wanted, run up and down the court and get shots up.”
“We knew,” he said, “we had to make them uncomfortable.”
“With us, it’s coming out right away,” guard Tyrese Hunter said. “Just meeting them, making them know it’s not going to be easy tonight.”
Iowa went almost seven minutes without a field goal in the first half, missing 13 of 14 shots in one stretch.
“I thought they did a really good job defensively of being up in our space,” Iowa coach Fran McCaffery said. “They were really locked in defensively. I think sometimes when that happens you quick-shoot the ball, and in the first half we were quick-shooting a little bit. They were decent shots, not great shots.”
Forward Keegan Murray, who came into the game as the nation’s leading scorer at 23.9 points per game, did not score until almost 7 ½ minutes into the second half. That came a possession after a dunk by Hunter had Hilton at a full, furious song.
“Any time I caught it someone was on me,” said Murray, still bothered by the right ankle injury that caused him to miss last Friday’s game at Purdue. “I missed a lot of bunnies around the rim, a lot of shots I should have made.”
Murray had nine points on 4-of-17 shooting.
“My job, as far as I was concerned, was to stop him,” Brockington said. “He’s a good player, of course he was going to get some (points). We had to just keep him from dominating.”
The Cyclones’ rebounding edge was just as big of a problem. They had 21 offensive rebounds that were converted into 19 second-chance points.
“They just got too many chances to score the ball, too many chances to get the crowd into it, too many chances to get into a rhythm,” forward Patrick McCaffery said. “It’s something we have to go back and try to fix.”
Iowa has been outrebounded 144-85 in this current three-game losing streak. It was one thing when it was the monstrous frontcourt of Purdue, or the bulk of Illinois’ Kofi Cockburn.
“Tonight,” Patrick McCaffery said, “we have no excuse.”
“At the end of the day, you can say their defense was great, which it was,” Bohannon said. “But we’ve got to do a lot better job on the offensive glass and the defensive glass. We can’t keep continuing to get outrebounded by 15 or 20.”
“If you’re struggling with 27 percent, you’ve got to go get some back,” Fran McCaffery said. “They did that, we didn’t.”
Brockington was no stranger to the Hawkeyes — he had 23 points against them two seasons ago in a win when he was at Penn State. He made his first nine shots and finished 11-of-14 from the field.
“He set the tone,” Iowa State coach T.J. Otzelberger said. “Man, when he gets it going, he’s pretty special.”
“Just got going," Brockington said. "I wanted to beat this team.”
And so he and the Cyclones did, leaving the Hawkeyes with plenty of questions heading into their finals week break.
Two years ago, when the Hawkeyes won at Hilton, Bohannon left behind his shoes, thinking it would be his last game at his rival’s home. “Thanks for the memz,” he wrote.
This time, he said, there wasn’t anything left to say. The Cyclones made sure the volume of the night smothered everything else.
“It was fun as hell,” Bohannon said, trying to sound convincing.
