Buckeyes Upend No. 9 Iowa, 72-62 – Ohio State Buckeyes
1/5/2002 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Jan 5, 2002
Box Score| Quotes| Notes
Postgame audio:
Head Coach Jim O’Brien
Iowa Head Coach Steve Alford
By RUSTY MILLER
AP Sports Writer
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) – Ohio State’s fast start wore out No. 9 Iowa at the finish.
Brian Brown scored 19 points, including 10 in a row in the second half, as Ohio State started and finished fast in a 72-62 victory over No. 9 Iowa on Saturday night.
“It was a big game for both teams,” Iowa coach Steve Alford said. “At the beginning, their kids thought it was a lot bigger for them than it was for us.”
Ohio State roared out to a 20-2 lead, Iowa surged back to take the lead and then the Buckeyes sprinted away again in the closing minutes.
“I’m sitting there thinking, ‘This is nice, but it’s going to get a lot more difficult,”‘ Ohio State coach Jim O’Brien said of the early onslaught. “I don’t know if we can play any better than we did the opening 10 minutes. But you just knew they were going to come back.”
The win was the fourth in a row for the Buckeyes (10-2, 2-0 Big Ten), who surprisingly share the Big Ten lead with Indiana and Michigan after the conference’s first week of play.
“I think we should be ranked, but it really doesn’t matter,” Brown said.
Iowa (12-4, 1-1), which became the last Big Ten team to lose in Value City Arena, had won its last six.
Boban Savovic added 14 points, Brent Darby 13 and Zach Williams 12 points and 10 rebounds for Ohio State, which ran its record to 9-2 against ranked opponents and 4-1 against top-10 teams in the last four years.
“We’d been talking about toughness,” O’Brien said. “We were very, very tough tonight.”
| Audio/Video from |
| VIDEO: Ohio State’s Brian Brown gets the basket to go despite being fouled hard by Luke Recker. 56k | 100k | 300k VIDEO: Brent Darby steps into the passing lane then takes it the distance for the hoop and the harm. VIDEO: Boban Savovic knocks down the 3-pointer and extends the Buckeyes’ lead to 14 points with 2:30 to play. |
Reggie Evans scored 18 points and had nine rebounds for the Hawkeyes. Luke Recker, leading the Big Ten in scoring at 19.2 points per game, was held to 11 points on 4-of-10 shooting. Pierre Pierce added 10 points.
“We just locked Recker and Evans down,” Brown said. “It’s hard to control both of them, but we did.”
It was a game of fits and starts. Ohio State took the early lead and then fell behind 33-30 on Recker’s 3-pointer from the left wing with 16:29 left in the game.
Ohio State then went on a 21-7 run. Brown scored 10 consecutive points for the Buckeyes, including the bucket that preceded Recker’s perimeter shot.
“The last 12 minutes, what happened at the start of the game really caught up with us,” Alford said. “You can’t get down 20-2 in this league, at home or on the road. Our start tonight was about as bad as we can have.”
After Iowa drew to 43-40 on Evans’ reverse layup at the 10:07 mark, the Buckeyes ran off the next eight points – Brown starting the run with a 15-foot jumper and Savovic ending it with a 3-pointer with 8:19 left that made it 51-40.
The Hawkeyes came right back to cut it to 58-51 on a 3-pointer by Rod Thompson just seconds after he had come into the game for the first time.
Again, Ohio State held on. Despite hitting just 18 of 32 free throws, the Buckeyes scored their next eight points at the line – the first four by Darby – as Iowa struggled to make up the deficit.
The lead never dropped below nine points in the last five minutes.
“We feel we’re one of the best teams in the Big Ten – but we had to win this game,” Darby said.
Ohio State hit 50 percent of its shots from the field (24 of 48) to Iowa’s 18 of 43 (42 percent). The Buckeyes had shot better than 60 percent from the field in their previous two games.
Iowa had 14 turnovers in the opening half and finished with 22.
Ohio State came out of the blocks prepared to pull off yet another upset on a day of upsets around the country. Six players scored in a 20-2 streak over the first 7 minutes.
Alford changed things around with a timeout at the 12:31 mark, switching to a zone that baffled the Buckeyes. After hitting 9 of their first 11 shots from the field, they hit 1 of their next 11.
They turned things around when the Hawkeyes tired from being forced to come back.
“We talked about the respect factor, how if we were ever interested in gaining any respect on the national level, then this was they type of game you have to win,” O’Brien said.
