Tom Crean deserves a heck of a lot of credit for the job he did this year. People wanted him fired in December, he lost James Blackmon Jr. and now the Hoosiers locked up the Big Ten before the finale.
Yogi Ferrell – hell of a player. Guy has won a lot of Big Ten games and has kind of been forgotten about this year.
congrats to IU. well deserved. I think a lot of people saw a good year in conference for them considering their schedule, but they have really gelled as team and had a lot of guys improve a ton over the course of the year.
on a related note, Fran McCaffery worst in game coach in the Big Ten? Two games in a row where he watches his team throw away possessions late and never calls timeout to get anything set up. Tonight was especially bad with gesell sitting on the bench with a couple minutes left and iowa has multiple terrible possessions in a row.
I get that the schedule was pretty light, but Michigan State’s was about as light.
MSU played also played Iowa twice, but had single plays against IU, Maryland, Purdue with only Purdue on the road. I don’t think there’s any question MSU is the best team in the Big Ten… I just can’t figure out how they didn’t win it given their ability and schedule.
undoubtedly they would say it was because valentine got hurt for those few games, even thought IU played without one of their best players throughout the Big Ten. In reality it was just because they threw the game away late against Wisconsin and somehow lost at home to Nebraska.
To be fair it looked like Fran drew up a couple nice plays at the very end. They got two great looks. The timeout after the first miss was really smart, and Dakich and Tirico noted how the staff/bench and guys on the court were all on the same page as if they had just talked about that scenario. I really saw it as Iowa’s players failing late in the game and missing shots.
agree the last two plays were very well executed but they were lucky to even be in that situation. They had several opportunities earlier to win that game and ran zero offense multiple times with Gesell on the bench and two timeouts to use.
Also worth noting that IU’s conf SOS is down to 12th per KenPom, I suspect the game against Maryland should drop it even further.
MSU could end up with the easiest schedule with a trip to Rutgers and home game vs. OSU.
All I have to say is: Barf
I was puzzled by Fran’s game management last night, too. I thought Iowa looked totally gassed at the end of that game. They front-rimmed a ton of shots and lost a couple of 50/50s by hardly moving. I kept waiting for Fran to call a T/O to get them a breather and get Gesell back in the game. But the dude is going to his grave with as many timeouts as possible, I guess.
For as many seniors as they have, they make some of the dumbest mistakes too. What was Woodbury doing on that tipin?