Candy Stripes is an IU basketball comic by Shane Johnson Studios that appears bi-weekly on Inside the Hall. You can purchase prints or original artwork by contacting Shane at ShaneJohnsonStudios@gmail.com.
+ Connect to Inside the Hall with Facebook: Inside the Hall readers can now login and post comments using their Facebook account. Just click the Facebook Connect link under the comment box to get started.
Hey, so that was fun, right?
Haha, just kidding! That wasn’t fun at all! That was precisely as much fun as a rusty ballpeen hammer to the eye socket, only less violent, so long as you don’t count “throwing an empty can of whatever stupid health drink I’m swilling these days across the f–king room” as violence. The only thing that could have made last night’s second half less fun was if Tom Hamilton and Shon Morris were screaming and rattling off stupid one-liners, respectively, throughout the entire godforsaken telecast. Oh, wait. They were.
F–K.
I mean, really, where to start? With IU’s brilliant, peerless, unbelievable and unlikely first half? With Michigan’s inversely horrible one? With the Hoosiers’ slow descent in the second half? With the way Michigan gradually edged their way back in the game — not at all once, but with the methodical surety of a team absolutely confident of their superiority?
Instead I’ll start (this is sort of a start I guess; the actual start, as you likely noticed, was the angry diatribe at the top of the post) with halftime. Right in the middle, before the flood. IU was winning by a margin I’d honestly rather not recount. A few seconds after the buzzer sounded for halftime, I found myself doing something peculiar: clapping. To myself. This isn’t exactly rare; it happens every time I get even marginally excited about beating some snotty Brit in FIFA 09. But I did catch myself, and stop for a second, and pay attention to my computer again, and think, and that’s when it hit me:
The Dread.
THE GOOD:
We played very good for very long against a borderline Top 25 team, who has beaten the likes Duke and UCLA. The first half was so promising, so full of life, it was a feeling we haven’t felt all year. Good times. Good, yet fleeting times.
IU showed great resilience in their defense all night. Michigan just happened to start hitting in the second half.
Matt Roth. Roth is slowly becoming quite the fan favorite. His game certainly doesn’t jump out at you, but outside of a guy that can dribble drive and slam down a rim-roaring dunk, the deep three that hits nothing but nylon is one of this game of basketball’s pretty plays. He made 3-of-7 attempts from three-point land on the night, for a total of nine points.
Devan Dumes. He’s hot, he’s cold. He’s under control and looking good, he’s wild and taking boneheaded shots. But hey, tonight, he hit some key buckets, and you just need to take the good and bad with Dumes. He shot nine threes tonight, hitting four of them. For the evening, he had 17 points.
Indiana head coach Tom Crean couldn’t have drawn it up any better.
After a head scratching home loss to Lipscomb to close out 2008 and a road loss to Iowa in the Big Ten opener, the Hoosiers returned to Assembly Hall for a meeting with Michigan, who hadn’t won in Bloomington since 1995.
And with a 44-24 lead with 18:26 remaining, it appeared Indiana was on its way to a win over a team that was ranked in the top 25 as recently as last week with wins over UCLA and Duke.
But in this season of rebuilding, the upset wasn’t in the cards. Michigan closed the second half by outscoring the Hoosiers 35-15 to send the game into overtime and won 72-66 in front of 11,044 fans.
“There are no moral victories,” Indiana freshman guard Verdell Jones said. “We are all competitors and a loss is a loss whether you lose by 30 or you lose by one. We don’t want to feel like this again.”
Peering at Ken Pomeroy’s ratings, you will see very high numbers next to Indiana’s stats. This is because they rank near the bottom of Division I basketball in a lot of categories. Here’s a quick run through as of yesterday, keeping in mind there are 344 Division-I basketball teams.
Some select offensive stats:
And onwards to defense:
Notice anything that sticks out? (Hint: It’s in the title of this post and I’ve bolded it.) Yes, that’s right, you get the gold star: IU opponents are turning the ball over on 24.5 percent of their possessions, good for 33rd best in the nation. Out of all the Hoosiers’ stats, this is their outlier. (If you are unsure of what some of these stats are and would like them explained, peep this and this.)
