For Hawkeye men, it’s beat Ohio State or forget about NCAA tournament

In the words of Billy Clyde Puckett, nobody ever said it wasn’t gonna be semi-tough.

Iowa’s path to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament will either start or end in downtown Minneapolis. The Hawkeyes (18-13) have no realistic hope of getting into the Field of 68 without beating Ohio State on Thursday in their 5:30 p.m. Big Ten tournament game at Target Center.

If they do so, they’ll probably still need to defeat No. 13 Illinois in Friday’s quarterfinals to be on the good side of the NCAA bubble, and the Illini are the team that beat them in Iowa City Sunday, 73-61.

“Of course we want to win the whole thing,” Iowa senior guard Tony Perkins said Tuesday. “But if we don’t, we at least want to get to the position where we can make it to the NCAA tournament.”

Perkins said he thought his team needed two wins.

Before two comes one, and Ohio State is nobody’s pushover. The Buckeyes (19-12) have won their last four games, and mowed down Rutgers 73-51 in New Jersey Sunday.

They are 5-1 under interim head coach Jake Diebler, who took over after Chris Holtmann was fired Feb. 14. Instead of unraveling altogether, Ohio State has gone the other way with wins over regular-season champion Purdue, Michigan State and Nebraska.

“I think you looked at that roster coming into the season and felt like they would be one of the better teams in our league,” Iowa Coach Fran McCaffery said.

“We beat them by two. It wasn’t like we beat them by 20. It was a good team that we beat at that time.

In the teams’ regular-season meeting, the Hawkeyes won 79-77 on Feb. 2 in Iowa City. The game had 15 ties and 10 lead changes.

Ohio State was 16-19 last season, but won three games in the Big Ten tourney including a 73-69 victory over Iowa. Bruce Thornton, then a freshman guard, had 17 points and six assists in that game, and has been the focal point of OSU’s offense this season.

Thornton has averaged 17.2 points and 4.6 assists since the coaching change.

“He’s a handful,” McCaffery said. “He’s a playmaker, but he runs the point, he makes plays for himself, for other people. He attacks the defense, gets in the lane, finds people. Can score the ball at all levels.”

Perkins is Iowa’s counterpart. He had a bit of a breakthrough at the 2022 Big Ten tourney starting at point guard. He averaged 10.3 points and 4.5 assists at that event in support of Keegan Murray, Jordan Bohannon and others as the Hawkeyes won four games in four days to win the championship.

“At this point,” Perkins said, “we’ve got to win a few games to get in the position we want to be in. Honestly, just take everything out of anger you’ve got, maybe all the stress you’ve got from school or whatever, and try to put that toward the game.

“Just go out there and have fun, and play your heart out.”

If Iowa wins, it’s on to Friday here. If it loses, expect an NIT game in Iowa City next Tuesday.

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