College basketball: Big Ten roundup: IN clinches title outright

While the Hoosiers have notched a share of their second Big Ten title in four years for the first time since the 1991 and 1993 seasons, the Hawkeyes now have merely an outside shot at their first in 37 years. Will Indiana do what UCLA did when they got rid of Ben Howland after he won a conference title?

Did you see this coming, this IN outright Big Ten championship that prevailed over Maryland hype, Iowa dominance and Michigan State surge?

They fixed some of those problems in a rematch with the Hoosiers on Tuesday night. Good guard play and for IN to win on the road IN a hostile environment without James Blackmon Jr.

10 – IU keeping it simple.

Here’s the logic and how things could play out. Complication yields confusion, and basic yields confident and repeatable performance. They treat every day for what it is, like it’s the most important day they have. He turned Thomas Bryant from a liability into the active, aggressive paint presence that he was hyped as being when he entered the program as a freshman.

“It was such a high-level game, the energy in the building was incredible”, Crean said on his postgame radio show.

7 – Grad transfer rule has been used very well by Crean. Anthony Clemmons shot an airball on a 3-pointer from the left wing but Adam Woodbury speared it and called timeout with 2.1 seconds to go. But as Fran Fraschilla tweeted last night, Crean vowed he’d fix things. Now? Danuel House scored 19 points and No. 20 Texas A&M rolled off 20 consecutive in a come-from-behind 81-63 victory over Auburn.

This was not how we imagined Iowa’s Senior Day going a few weeks ago. Zeisloft and Bielfeldt combined for 19 points.

Under this scenario, eight teams would finish with 11 or more Big Ten wins. He is durable, starting in all 30 games this season. The last four meetings between these teams prior to Tuesday were all played at Assembly Hall in Bloomington, Ind…. He played three minutes on Sunday at Ohio State but his aggressiveness made an impact on Iowa’s coaching staff. That’s a marked improvement over his past as an empty possession/highlight reel machine.

MI sophomore Katelynn Flaherty is Big Ten’s third leading scorer. Playing the 105th toughest schedule in the nation and the 13th toughest in the Big Ten has its perks. Even with Robert Johnson sidelined during the last two games – leaving IU with only two scholarship guards – Crean was able to make the lineups work.

Will Crean decide that it’s better to leave a year too early instead of a year too late, that risking the quality of his life and his family’s life is not worth the money? IN put up what was quite possibly the team’s worst defensive showing – they tried zone and man-to-man defense, both to no avail – in the 94-74 slugfest. Schemes are simpler and execution is more exact now that the Hoosiers no longer have a great offensive asset at their disposal. Basketball isn’t some mystical game that requires years in a monastery to understand. Jok, who struggled with shot selection in the past, has become a lethal three point shooter. Keep the other guys from doing it, and you win a lot of games.

As a team, the Hoosiers shot 11-of-22 from downtown (50 percent), including a dagger step back trey from senior point guard Yogi Ferrell and one three from Troy Williams, who only shoots 33 percent from beyond the arc. In that game, Tom Crean made the right adjustments on defense to get the Hoosiers in position to win. “It was frustrating because we had good looks that didn’t go in”. It should not be discounted what he has done for this team and he may be more valuable to his individual group than anyone else in the conference. And at the beginning of the year, the Hoosiers looked to be running into the same issues. Crean has gone to the whip less often, so his team has more left in the tank than their opponents. Considering Crean has been on the perennial hot seat ever since the Syracuse loss, he’s won back many doubters about his coaching prowess – including myself – this season.