Overtime loss at Iowa continues Indiana's late-season free fall

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What a difference a year has made for the Indiana Hoosiers.

During last season's visit to Iowa City, Tom Crean's crew clinched the regular-season Big Ten championship.

Tuesday, things followed a familiar pattern for how things have gone in 2016-17. Indiana blew an early 13-point lead, coughed away a game in the final minutes of regulation and let Iowa star Peter Jok score 15 points in overtime — 11 of those coming from the free-throw line — in a 96-90 loss that served as the crimson and cream's fifth straight defeat and seventh in the last eight games.

So a season after they were the No. 1 seed in the Big Ten Tournament, the Hoosiers are barreling toward a bottom-four seed, which means playing in one of two Wednesday-night games.

It's got Crean predictably on the hot seat, though when hasn't he been the subject of that discussion during his tenure in Bloomington?

Truly, though, this season has reached the disaster stage for a team that was one of the preseason favorites to win the conference title. Those non-conference wins against Kansas and North Carolina now seem to have happened in a different season altogether. The midseason injury to OG Anunoby has loomed large.

But what's happened to Indiana hallmarks, like scoring a ton of points? During the seven-losses-in-eight-games stretch, two went to overtime — one went to three overtimes — inflating the point totals. In those six regulation games, all losses, Indiana averaged just 62.7 points, nearly 18 points lower than its season average, which still ranks second in the Big Ten.

Defense has never been Indiana's strong suit in recent seasons, and that showed Tuesday.

Out to a great start against a sliding Iowa team that entered on a three-game losing streak, Indiana couldn't make that early advantage stick. Iowa went on a 12-0 run in the middle of the first half to erase that double-digit gap. And though over the course of the remainder of the first half and the start of the second half the Hoosiers grew leads as big as seven and eight, none of those had long life either.

Indiana led by eight with under five minutes to play, but Iowa countered with six straight points to whittle the gap down to two in 40 seconds. A couple modest four-point edges for Indiana followed, but the Hawkeyes got a Tyler Cook dunk to tie the game at 70 with a little more than two and a half minutes to go. Iowa grabbed its first lead of the game on another Cook dunk a few seconds later. The teams went back and forth from there, with Josh Newkirk's free throws in the final minute of regulation sending the game to overtime.

The Hawkeyes kind of ran away with overtime. The Hoosiers at one point had an 81-80 lead, but from there the Hawkeyes outscored the visitors 16-9, getting 15 points from Peter Jok in the extra period. Jok poured in 11 free throws in overtime, half of his program-record-setting total of 22 on the night. Jok finished with 35 points, one of four Iowa players in double figures. The record he broke, set by former Hawkeye and NBA coaching legend Don Nelson, stood for 55 years.

Indiana's offense was good, shooting 53.6 percent from the field in the second half. But Iowa went to the free-throw line 24 times over those 20 minutes and another 16 in overtime.

Iowa's win said plenty about the mediocrity not just of this team but of the Big Ten in general this season. The Hawkeyes started conference play 3-2 before a three-game losing streak, then a three-game winning streak, then another three-game losing streak and now a big win over Indiana. After that three-game winning streak, Iowa sat in fifth or sixth place in the league standings, looking like a fringe tournament contender. But the typically high-scoring Hawkeyes scored just 66 points in back-to-back losses to Michigan State and Illinois, losing the latter on their home court. The Hoosiers are no defensive juggernaut and sit in the bottom four of the Big Ten standings, but the Hawkeyes got a big win Tuesday if only because it could keep them from playing one of those Wednesday-night games in the Big Ten Tournament. Of course, this could all change quickly, with the next two games coming at Maryland and at Wisconsin.

Meanwhile, what happens next for Indiana? Could Crean's future really be in jeopardy one year after winning a conference title? That, of course, is a decision for Indiana athletics director Fred Glass and not anyone else. But with games remaining against Northwestern and Purdue, two of the top four teams in the Big Ten, it's certainly a possibility that the Hoosiers end the regular season with losses in nine of their last 11 games. Hopes of reaching the NCAA tournament were dashed long ago, a shocking development considering Indiana was at one point a top-10 team this season.

How the mighty have fallen.

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