A little under a minute later, the senior guard made another from almost the exact same spot near the top of the arc. The difference between the two was after the first, Ferrell broke his career scoring record of 30 points. The second simply extended the career high in points.
All in all, Ferrell finished with a game-high 38 points while making 12 of his 18 shots from the field in IU’s 90-65 win against IPFW.
“I was surprised myself some shots went in, because some of the time I couldn’t even see the rim because they had a hand in my face,” Ferrell said. “My mindset was just go out there and attack the rim.”
Ferrell also finished the game 4-of-8 from three point range and the Hoosiers finished 9-of-22 from behind the arc. This came after IU started the game just 2-of-8 from 3-point range and 3-of-11 in the first half. All four of Ferrell’s 3-pointers came in the second half.
Sophomore guard Robert Johnson also finished with 16 points while shooting a perfect 5-for-5 from behind the arc.
“It was just a good effort by my teammates,” Johnson said. “They found me and I was open. A lot of the shots I got were wide open so you can’t miss a lot of those.”
Defensively, the Hoosiers continued their improvement Wednesday night. In its last two games, IU has held its opponents to 33 percent shooting. The Hoosiers are just being more aggressive, IU Coach Tom Crean said.
Johnson had 14 deflections. Freshman guard Harrison Niego dove through the IPFW bench after a loose ball and broke a chair.
The Hoosiers have also improved fundamentally on defense in the past two games.
“I think we’re doing a lot better job helping each other on defense and saying which way we have to help, even ball screen coverage,” Ferrell said.
Crean echoed Ferrell’s statements about freshman center Bryant. He improved immensely Wednesday in defending and adjusting to IPFW’s pick-and-roll offense throughout the game.
Crean still admitted that even though he wasn’t concerned about how Bryant looked on the stat sheet versus IPFW, Bryant will need to improve statistically going forward if IU wants to compete against better teams. Bryant finished with four points and two rebounds against IPFW.
As for Ferrell, he was just hoping for a few more points. Ferrell finished with 38 points. The IU record for points in a game is 42 points, set by Steve Alford in 1987.
“It would have been fun to get to break a record but I’m not going to force shots,” Ferrell said. “I basically took what the defense gave me but I’m going to keep that in my mind next time.”
