Hawkeye men need to shake off their nagging cold on the road if they are to beat Wisconsin

The Iowa men’s basketball team was on the road again Tuesday afternoon, hoping to put Northwestern in the rearview mirror.

Wisconsin is the closest Big Ten neighbor to Iowa City, and the Hawkeyes bus to basketball games there. That could pose a dicey situation after Wednesday’s 8 p.m. Iowa-Wisconsin game, because the weather forecast for Madison called for a blustery late-night with freezing rain and sleet.

“We’ll deal with that at the time,” Iowa Coach Fran McCaffery said Tuesday morning.

The only thing about the trip that matters to the Hawkeyes until the trip home is how they play against the Badgers. Less than two days after getting home from an ugly 80-60 loss at Northwestern Sunday night, Iowa needs to refocus if it is to avoid another hole in the road.

Reasons for Sunday’s loss were clear. The Hawkeyes were 3-of-24 from deep against the Wildcats, and are 16-of-72 (22.2 percent) over their last four road games.

“We were 20-for 30 from 2s,” McCaffery said. “We missed open 3s. It wasn’t anything they did defensively.

“It was turnovers (15) and we made defensive mistakes. We were not clicking defensively at all.”

Iowa is 9-7 in the Big Ten, but just 2-6 on the road. If the Hawkeyes are to finish in the top four of the conference’s standings, they almost surely must win at Wisconsin or at Indiana next Tuesday.

The Badgers just need to win, period. They’re on the right side of the NCAA tournament bubble at 7-9 in the Big Ten and 15-11 overall according to garden-variety bracketologists, but barely.

Rutgers won at Kohl Center last Saturday, 58-57. Wisconsin can ill afford another such loss.

Defensively, Iowa is a movable object going up against a stoppable force. The Hawkeyes easily are last in Big Ten games in field goal percentage defense, allowing opponents to shoot 49.1 percent from the field.

However, Wisconsin easily is last in field goal percentage, at just 40.5 percent. Four of the Badgers’ top five scorers are shooting under 40 percent in Big Ten contests.

Wisconsin is Wisconsin. You’ve seen the way the Badgers play for the last quarter-century. It isn’t pretty, but it has worked.

Iowa has to be good Iowa to beat the Badgers. If not, it’s really going to be a long trip home.

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