No. 15 IU Awaits Iowa Basketball

Hawkeyes Heading to Bloomington Tuesday for Key B1G Tilt

Iowa’s Payton Sandfort (left) and Indiana’s Jalen Hood-Shifino goo after a loose ball on Jan. 5, 2022 at Carver-Hawkeye Arena in Iowa City, Iowa. (Rob Howe/HawkeyeNation.com)

There is plenty at stake for Iowa in the final week of the Big Ten men’s basketball season.

The Hawkeyes (18-11 overall, 10-8 Big Ten) are currently in a tie for sixth place with Illinois and Rutgers — Iowa owns the tiebreakers over both — but sit just one game behind the four-way tie for second place. And the Hawkeyes own the tiebreakers over three of the teams in that group — Indiana, Maryland and Michigan.

So, sweep the week — at Indiana on Tuesday night and at home against Nebraska on Sunday — and the Hawkeyes are in good shape for a double-bye in next week’s conference tournament in Chicago.

It starts against the Hoosiers (20-9, 11-7), but it’s not an easy task. Indiana is coming off a road win against conference regular-season champion Purdue and has won 10 of its last 13 games.

And while the Hawkeyes already have a win over the Hoosiers — a 91-89 victory in early January — neither team will have a surprise for the other this late in the season.

“I think most teams have a variety of things that they can do,” Iowa coach Fran McCaffery said on Monday. “So you might go from one package to another. At the end of the day is not what you're running, it's who's running it

“There's a lot of tape out on everybody. So then it comes down to, can you make shots? Can you not turn the ball over? Can you rebound effectively? Can you at least execute what you're trying to run effectively and put yourself in a position (to win).”

Saturday’s 79-71 win over the Boilermakers was impressive, McCaffery said, especially considering where the game was played.

“I thought they played, in a very difficult environment, the game that they wanted to play,” he said. “They kind of played at their pace. There was no panic, they played like a veteran, mature team I thought, and anything short of that, in that building, you have no chance.”

McCaffery knows the Hoosiers are stacked with talent, led by Trayce Jackson-Davis, who is third in the conference in scoring at 20.1 points per game.

“There's only so many things you can do to a guy like him,” McCaffery said. “The thing with him is, he's a veteran guy. So it's not like you're going to come up with something ingenious that’s going to confuse him. There’s nothing he hasn’t seen.

“When it's all said and done, when you have a great player like that, you’ve just got to make him work as best you can. You’ve got to make him make as many decisions as possible, and try to execute what we do.”

The Hoosiers’ backcourt of Jalen Hood-Schifino and Trey Galloway can also be troublesome. Hood-Schifino averages 13.6 points per game while Galloway averages 7.3. They have combined for 152 assists.

“They’re both terrific players,” McCaffery said. “And I think the beautiful thing there for them is, it doesn't matter who brings it down. They both can score, they both can play the point ,they both can play in the open floor, they both have size. And they really settled in after Xavier Johnson got injured. It took them a little bit to just get used to playing with one another. And it's really worked well with those two guys.”