The Assembly Center on the Indiana University campus roared to life once again as the #3 ranked Hoosiers hosted the nation’s number one basketball team, the University of Michigan. Widely known as being one of the toughest venues in NCAA competition, the highly partial home crowd of over 18,000 screaming fans were chanting “We’re No. 1!” half way through the second half. The Wolverines were going down to Big 10 rival Indiana. Cody Zeller had 19 points and Oladipo added 15 more to add to the 81 -73 victory by the Hoosiers.
IU head coach Tom Crean was not even in Bloomington for the game as he was off to see his two brother-in-laws, the Harbaugh brothers, play a football game down in New Orleans.
The Hoosier victory would have been great news in Kansas, except that the Jayhawks also lost their game to a feisty Oklahoma State team causing them to sink rather than rise in the polls this week.
Indiana had been up there at the number one spot for 7 weeks earlier in the season before running into a Butler team in mid-December that has set out to be the NCAA giant killers this season. Then Wisconsin came to Bloomington and caught the Hoosiers having a rare bad outing at home. Since then, Indiana has won 5 straight and speculation is high that they might just remain in the top spot for a while longer this time. Maintaining the number one spot is probably harder than attaining it, as several teams have already found out this year.
“It’s a huge accomplishment”, said Oladipo after the game. “You know we started there, we had a hard road to get back here. We’re just going to continue to keep working.” If the boys from the “Big I” keep playing like they played against the Wolverines, Indiana might just have a shot at hanging in there at No. 1.
Staying up there may again prove to be quite a task for the Hoosiers as they must now travel to Illinois and then the Ohio State for back to back road games against two really good basket ball teams. They still have to face Michigan again on March 10….this time up in Ann Arbor.
Hoosiers Head Coach Tom Crean said after the game, “Sometimes in these situations with all the hoopla and the hype, the game doesn’t live up to it.
This one did!”
