Hlas: Another unsatisfying 1-night stand for Hawkeyes

CHICAGO - OK, this is a fact and not an attempt to blow smoke:

Many is the college basketball team that set off a stink bomb early in its conference tournament and bounced back to inflict damage on others in the NCAA tourney.

OK, this is also a fact:

No. 5-seed Iowa laid an egg the size of the United Center Thursday in its 67-58 Big Ten tourney loss to 13th-seeded Penn State.

It happened again. Another Thursday at this event, another flameout against an inferior opponent. Inferior over the regular-season, anyhow. The Hawkeyes and the Big Ten tourney are two ships that always pass quickly in the night.

'It'll be hard for me to watch the rest of this tournament, to be honest,” said Iowa senior forward Aaron White, who never played in the event in a Saturday semifinal, or its last two Friday quarterfinals.

Analysis couldn't be easier. The Hawkeyes shot 26.3 percent from the field, and allowed 48 second-half points to a Penn State offense you could have generously called 'anemic” at halftime when Iowa led 27-19.

His players did Iowa Coach Fran McCaffery no favors. Nor did he do them one when he got called for a technical foul for barking at the officials with 9:03 left and his team down 42-40.

Terrific Nittany Lion senior guard D.J. Newbill made two free throws off the technical, then hit a jumper on the subsequent possession. It was 46-40, and Penn State led the rest of the way.

Without the technical, who knows? It may not have ultimately mattered. But like everything else in the second half, it sure didn't help.

Last year, Iowa staggered to a Thursday defeat against Northwestern, plunging to a No. 11 seed and a play-in game in the NCAAs. The Hawkeyes are safely in this year's NCAA field. But the good that could have been done by winning a game or two here won't be on the Hawkeyes' resume, so they can't complain about anything they get Sunday afternoon.

Again, I'll remind you conference tourneys often aren't indicators of the NCAA first-week madness ahead. For instance, Michigan was the No. 5 seed in the Big Ten tourney two years ago and was eliminated in Friday's quarterfinals. It proceeded to finish its season in the national-title game.

That's what is known as an extreme example. That Michigan team had future NBA guards Trey Burke, Tim Hardaway Jr., and Nik Stauskas. The Hawkeyes' guards shot a combined 3-of-19 Thursday.

'We had plenty of confidence and played hard,” Iowa's Jarrod Uthoff said. 'We just didn't make shots. We've got to have confidence in our shot-making ability.”

If Iowa does win its NCAA opener next Thursday or Friday, this Penn State game will be forgotten as quickly as, well, every other Thursday game in the history of the Big Ten tournament.

Time after time, teams gather for the Sunday NCAA selection show and are immediately revived when their schools' names are called. Iowa didn't become a bad team Thursday. It did become one that should be free of delusions of grandeur and thus ready to return to work.

'We'll have their full attention, that's for sure,” McCaffery said. 'You don't really flush it. You study it and you make some teaching points.”

Amid the somberness in his team's locker room, Uthoff spoke with bravado his team needs to regain in a hurry.

'Go to the NCAA tournament and make a run,” was his response when asked what the Hawkeyes need to do now.

'We're one of the best teams in the country and we're going to look to prove that.”

Iowa couldn't shed the Big Ten tournament monkey on its back. But it can still ditch a larger ape.

It's been 14 years since Iowa's last NCAA victory. Fairly or not, how the Hawkeyes' season will be remembered comes down to the next game.

Comments: (319) 368-8840; mike.hlas@thegazette.com

Twitter: @Hlas

Facebook: 'Mike Hlas - The Gazette”