Defensive switch aids Iowa in second straight road upset

MINNEAPOLIS - Iowa Coach Fran McCaffery had plenty of questions about his team entering Wednesday's game against Minnesota.

With the Hawkeyes coming off a seven-point win at No. 11 Wisconsin, McCaffery wondered if his team could handle success and put forth the same effort and intensity against a different opponent in a road venue. After a 64-62 win at Williams Arena, McCaffery found his answer.

"I think that's a legitimate question," he said. "I had the same question myself. It wasn't for lack of explaining to them exactly what you're talking about. Are we going to be mentally tough enough? Are we going to be smart enough?"

Iowa needed mental toughness in the first half because it wasn't playing defense. At one point the Gophers scored on 11 of 14 possessions to take a 32-21 lead with 5:06 left in the first half. Minnesota sliced apart Iowa's man-to-man defense  - shooting 67 percent from the field - and McCaffery shifted the Hawkeyes to a 2-3 zone.

"I challenged them to be more aggressive defensively," McCaffery said. "They were scoring quickly and easily in man. We couldn't run because they were pretty much scoring every time. We shifted to the zone at that point, and we challenged them to keep the ball in front of us."

Iowa prevented Minnesota from scoring the rest of the half, and went on a 10-0 run to cut its halftime deficit to 32-31.

"The game's in the balance right there," McCaffery said. "It can go from 11 to 21 or it can go from 11 to one. It went from 11 to one."

Minnesota scored in spurts in the second half but could not sustain its first-half offensive barrage. The Gophers shot just 32.4 percent from the moment Iowa switched to zone.

"I've never seen something like that," Iowa sophomore forward Zach McCabe said. "They had a lot of  problems with it, and we played really good. We talked. That's what we needed to do. We didn't do that in the first half. We got rebounds. We got stops and we won the game."

"We switched defenses on them, and I think it threw them off," Iowa guard Devyn Marble said. "I think that's what got us in the game."

Iowa also used its fouls effectively. The Hawkeyes committed just seven in the second half, but three were in the final minute. Only once did the Gophers to shoot a free throw because of an Iowa foul in that situation.

"One of the things we did to shorten the game once we got up seven or eight, we used our fouls that we had to give," McCaffery said. "So even though we were missing free throws, they were running out of time."