Hawkeye women are .500 Big Ten team, and we still don’t know if they’re more

IOWA CITY — This season is 27 games old and we’re still not sure quite what to make of the Iowa women’s basketball team.

On one hand, it’s a team that’s 8-8 in the Big Ten, a long way from the 15-1 mark of leader USC and the 14-1 of UCLA.

On the other, the Hawkeyes are the team that gave USC its one scratch, and they pushed No. 3 UCLA to the final second Sunday at Carver-Hawkeye Arena before falling, 67-65.

On one hand, Iowa is the only one of the 26 teams UCLA has beaten that came within one score of the Bruins.

On another, the Hawkeyes have lost five games by one score (if you count their 86-78 overtime loss at No. 8 Ohio State last week), and haven’t won any contests decided on the last possession.

“I told ‘em, proud of them,” Iowa Coach Jan Jensen said after this game. “But until we collectively get kind of tired of coming that close, we can’t flip some of those games.

“But man, they battle.”

Obviously, Iowa doesn’t have a Lauren Betts. Who besides UCLA does? The 6-foot-7 junior made up for a lot of things the Bruins struggled with against a quite good Iowa defensive performance.

Betts had her typical 22 points, 12 rebounds, three blocks and seven fouls drawn. How many Hawkeye shots did she alter? Let’s just say Iowa didn’t shoot 36.7 percent because it was putting up a wheelbarrow-full of bricks.

It was reminiscent of when Iowa faced South Carolina’s 6-7 Kamilla Cardoso in the Gamecocks’ 87-75 national-title game victory. The Hawkeyes couldn’t do anything to offset Cardoso’s size and interior dominance.

With the home-court advantage and excellent defense of its own, it wasn’t the same thing for Iowa in this game. Nonethelesst, UCLA is 26-1 for many reasons, and it played like a champ in making a 12-point third-quarter deficit disappear.

We can always wonder if Iowa could have squeezed out a victory had a higher-percentage play been its last one after it called time down by two points with 3.8 seconds left.

When you’re trying to steal a win with Addison O’Grady making a 3-pointer though the center hadn’t shot one in a game in over two years, you’re looking for a fairy tale instead of something from a basketball textbook.

Jensen said it was Iowa’s third option. Maybe it should have been the fourth.

That said, this was another of the loud, fun, tense and thrilling games in this half-decade of such women’s basketball events at Carver. The reality is that any reasonable Hawkeye fan wearing Iowa black and gold — or on this day, pink — would have showed up welcoming the game to come down to a final Iowa possession for the win or tie against the Bruins.

But March is closing in, and the Hawkeyes will need to be better in the final minutes and seconds against someone really good to go deep in the Big Ten tournament or to reach the second week of the NCAA tourney.

Should either be an expectation this season? Probably not. But all the winning of the Caitlin Clark era couldn’t help but spoil everyone.

A road overtime loss and a 2-point home defeat to Top Ten teams within the last week isn’t the stuff of failure. It’s human, however, to crave more.

“I’ve feel like we’ve been so close these last two games,” Iowa junior guard Taylor McCabe said, “and I know that we can play with anybody. It’s just going to come down to how we execute at the end of games, and our shot-selection needs to be a little bit better as well.

“But we’ve still got plenty of year left and I know that we are building confidence every day.”

Coaches praise rival coaches. It’s part of the coaches’ code. UCLA’s Cori Close, though, sounded like she was under oath when she raved about Jensen after the Bruins won their second-toughest game of the season.

“Jan did a heck of a job (today),” Close said. “What she has done from bringing that team from the beginning of the year to now. They are tough. They are hard to guard. They know who they are.”

Whether the Hawkeyes can do anything special in the Big Ten and NCAA tourneys is anyone’s guess. A safe bet is that few teams want to be the ones to personally find out.

Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com