Iowa men's basketball announces 2017-18 Big Ten opponents

IOWA CITY — The Iowa men's basketball team got one more step in figuring out its 2017-18 schedule on Monday.

Iowa and the Big Ten announced opponents for the upcoming season's conference slate, and the Hawkeyes know who they'll welcome to Carver-Hawkeye Arena and where they're headed for road games in conference play.

Iowa has five home/away matchups, four home-only and four road-only matchups, and appears to avoid several of the toughest road matchups in the Big Ten. The Hawkeyes welcome Michigan State, Northwestern, Purdue and Wisconsin as home-only games and will go to Illinois, Maryland, Nebraska and Rutgers for the lone conference matchups with those teams.

The Hawkeyes have home-and-homes with Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Penn State and Ohio State — all teams Iowa only faced once last year in the regular season.

The four home-only games represent potentially four of the best teams in the conference. Michigan State lost to No. 1 seed Kansas in the second round of the NCAA Tournament last year and returns star forward Miles Bridges, while Northwestern is coming off its first NCAA Tournament with the majority of its roster back. Purdue returns Isaac Haas and Vincent Edwards, while Wisconsin is a perennial conference favorite and returns Ethan Happ. The Hawkeyes went 19-15 overall and 1-3 on the road against those teams last season, with the lone win at Wisconsin.

As for the road games, Iowa won at Maryland last year, and while the Hawkeyes lost at Illinois and Nebraska before winning at Rutgers, those three teams went a combined 17-37 in Big Ten play.

Dates and times for the Big Ten opponents will be released at a later date. The full 2017-18 schedule is close to being finalized.

For a few hours Monday on Iowa's website, Alabama State (Nov. 12), Grambling State (Nov. 16), Southern University (Dec. 10) and Northern Illinois (Dec. 29) were added to the already-announced non-conference games. Those unannounced games have since been removed from the website, and there has been no official announcement of the Hawkeyes' 2017-18 schedule.

Iowa does have confirmed matchups against Chicago State (Nov. 10), Louisiana (formerly Louisiana-Lafayette) on Nov. 20 to start the Cayman Islands Classic, Virginia Tech for the Big Ten/ACC Challenge (Nov. 28), Iowa State for the Cy-Hawk Series (Dec. 7), Drake for the Hy-Vee Classic (Dec. 16), Southern Utah (Dec. 19) and Colorado in a neutral-site game in Sioux Falls, S.D. on Dec. 22.

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