No. 3 Iowa State honors past greats, blows out No. 25 Baylor, 74-55, at home

AMES — One swish started the game. Another sealed the blowout win.

Milan Momcilovic shined radiantly from the 3-point line Saturday for No. 3 Iowa State, sinking 4 of 7 from long range as the Cyclones dispatched No. 25 Baylor, 74-55, before a sellout crowd of 14,267 at Hilton Coliseum.

“Just came out aggressive,” said Momcilovic, who scored 15 points in the Cyclones’ 26th straight home win. “Hunting the ones that are open and the guards found me, (forward) Joshua (Jefferson) found me, so it just speaks to our team looking for me.”

Hilton’s denizens looked on lovingly at halftime when several members of the back-to-back Big 12 champion 1999-2000 and 2000-01 teams were honored at midcourt. Fans reserved the loudest applause for former head coach Larry Eustachy, who fist pumped and swept his arm through the air to demonstrably acknowledge the raucous ovation.

“The fans are awesome,” said Eustachy, who led the 1999-2000 Cyclones to an Elite Eight appearance. “(ISU head coach T.J. Otzelberger’s) teams remind me a lot of our teams. They stay in front of guys. They’re playing harder than Baylor. They play as hard as anybody in the country, if not the hardest.”

Otzelberger’s Cyclones (12-1, 2-0 Big 12) limited the Bears (9-4, 1-1) to 29.7 percent shooting overall and a lowly 24.1 percent mark from the 3-point line. Baylor trailed by as many as 25 points and never led while losing for the fifth time in the past six meetings with ISU.

“T.J.’s got not only a really good team but an experienced team,” Bears head coach Scott Drew said. “I’ve said it all year, I think them and Auburn have been the two best teams in the country.”

Keshon Gilbert led the Cyclones with 16 points — and his season-high 10 rebounds matched big man Dishon Jackson’s output on the glass. ISU allowed Baylor to hoard 10 offensive rebounds in the first half, while yielding just three in the second.

“I mean, they were all over the glass early,” said Otzelberger, who is now tied with Fred Hoiberg for the second-most top-25 wins in program history with 23. “Part of how we’re trying to do things is the constancy over 40 minutes and we did challenge our guys at halftime in that area.”

Former Duke transfer guard Jeremy Roach led Baylor with 16 points despite missing six of his seven field goal attempts inside the 3-point arc. The Bears committed just eight turnovers, but struggled to get open looks at the basket as the Cyclones sternly contested shots all over the floor.

“Shoutout to Iowa State,” said Roach, who like Momcilovic, drained 4 of his 7 3-point tries. “They’re a great team. Obviously they’re ranked No. 3 for a reason.”

That’s because it’s hard to find, let alone exploit, a weakness for ISU, which shot 49 percent overall and 47.6 percent (10 of 21) from 3-point range. The Cyclones field the nation’s sixth-best offense and eighth-best defense, according to KenPom, and their array of capable shooters throughout their eight-man rotation make scoring lulls rare. Couple that with ISU’s commitment on the defensive end and it’s easy to see why Eustachy would compare this group to his best teams.

“Eustachy’s teams — defensively they were relentless,” said Otzelberger, whose team has ranked eighth or better on that end of the floor in each of his three-plus seasons at the helm. “They prided themselves on getting back on defense, sprinting back on defense, getting set and limiting teams to one shot. Those are things that we really try to carry forward.”

Case in point: Gilbert’s 10 rebounds from the guard position. It’s the fourth time the 6-4 senior from St. Louis has notched double-digit boards in his 50 games with the Cyclones.

“(Eustachy) has this term, ‘rebound down,’ which is something we’ve tried to incorporate,” Otzelberger said. “(That) means the bigs box out the bigs and the guards come down and get the rebound.”

And by doing that — along with hot shooting from Momcilovic and others — ISU has found a way to level-up to become an odds-on favorite to make the NCAA Tournament’s Final Four.

“We’ve got everything you need,” Momcilovic said. “We’re a dangerous team.”

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