Hlas: A second half of Hawkeye horrors, again

IOWA CITY - Yeah, people remember mid-March, not early January. It's what do you do down the stretch in the college basketball regular season, in the Big Ten tourney, in the postseason.

Yet, the Hawkeyes' 75-61 loss to Michigan State Thursday night was a bolo punch when Iowa athletics was already doubled over from last week's TaxSlayer Bowl debacle.

Within the same hour Iowa's football team released a new players' depth chart - that was certainly a new January wrinkle - the basketball team played a half that was a thing of beauty.

As the half progressed, confidence began oozing through the Hawkeyes. Center Gabe Olaseni was compared to Hakeem Olajuwon on the big broadcast of ESPN. Sophomore Peter Jok looked like a go-to guard in a big game for the first time. Jarrod Uthoff played like the reigning Big Ten Player of the Week that he is.

The defense wasn't just good, it was terrific. Iowa took a 39-28 lead to the locker room. And then - stop me if you've heard this one before.

The second-half score was Spartans 47, Hawkeyes 22. Another post-halftime avalanche. You may remember these:

Texas 47, Iowa 27. Iowa State 52, Iowa 42. Northern Iowa 33, Iowa 15.

Is this a bad time to note only Hofstra (28) and UC Davis (26) have blown more halftime leads in Division I than Iowa (25) since the 2010-11 season?

Michigan State 6-foot senior guard Travis Trice would have been applauded by Reggie Miller and Larry Bird for the way he was making threes. On the last of his four bombs in the half, Trice didn't have a Hawkeye within 10 feet of him. The crowd groaned before Trice even touched the ball.

What happened wasn't particularly complicated. Tom Izzo's guys played like they were Izzo's guys, and those guys have won and won and won. While Iowa played like Iowa, a program that still has to take the most-important step toward being something other than being on the edge of goodness.

That requires turning back the other team's comebacks, of not going all fetal-position when an 11-point lead vanishes.

'They didn't seem to have anybody grab the bull by the horns out there,” Izzo said.

He said that after pouring praise on the Hawkeyes, saying no one had dominated his team the way Iowa did in the first half, insisting 'This is a good team. They're good. They're really good. And I think they're going to get better.”

Izzo kind of knows basketball, but his words are no salve right now. Not when at halftime it was impossible not to picture Iowa 3-0 in the Big Ten. Not when Hawkdom needed something to grab after the thud of an ending to the football season six days earlier in Jacksonville.

'I think any team that wants to be a championship team, you've got to be consistent,” Iowa Coach Fran McCaffery said. 'It's got to be a consistency of effort, consistency of concentration, consistency of execution. If you do those things, you can survive missed shots.

'At some point you've got to believe in yourself, you've got to believe in the guys on both sides of you. That's what we've got to do.”

And if any Hawkeye wants to make a shot or two to interrupt an opponent's run, that would work, too.

l Comments: (319) 368-8840; mike.hlas@thegazette.com