Paging Dr. Heimlich

Hey, does anyone know when NIT tickets go on sale?\nWhen Missouri center Arthur Johnson fouled out with 4:29 left to play, I figured, "Alright! This one's over." I was right. But not in the way I imagined.\nSean Kline's free throws were the last points that IU would score the rest of the game.\nIt was just one more step in the debacle that the 2003-04 season is starting to become. The Tigers outscored IU 21-2 to close out the game, completely erasing what had been the best 36 minutes of basketball the Hoosiers have played all year. That's what makes this game so hard to assess. Anyone who was flipping through scores and saw "No. 4 Missouri 63, IU 58" would think the Hoosiers gave their best against a better team.\nAnd they did. But for the final 4:23 of the game, they gave their worst. And it was one of the worst choke jobs I've seen. (Maybe not as bad as the one the Oklahoma football team pulled later Saturday, but still perfectly ugly.)\nSo which do we read into more: the fact that IU is capable of competing with one of the top teams in the country, or the fact that they piddled away the lead faster than someone who just drank a liter of cola?\nThere were a lot of positives that could be taken out of the performance. We saw that Donald Perry is deserving of more playing time, as he put up a career-high 13 points. And in the first half, everything IU did on offense and defense seemed to work.\nBut I think the negatives far outweigh the positives in this case. Should they find themselves ahead in the game, the Hoosiers have proven that they are incapable of holding on to it. They blew a 14-point lead against Xavier last week only to win in overtime. Even UNC-Greensboro was able to hang around for most of the game due to IU's lack of a killer instinct.\nAnother factor was poor decision-making by players and the coaching staff. Despite being in the double bonus, all of IU's shots in the final 4:23 were jump shots. In this situation, somebody has to do something to get the ball inside and draw a foul. It's two free throws every time.\nAdding fuel to the fire was the fact that the same lineup was in the game for the entire crash and burn that occurred after the final media timeout. Personally, even if he is a freshman, I would have preferred a Pat Ewing Jr. sighting. Or just any sort of variety in a lineup that was clearly getting outplayed.\nBut the key to the game (as it will be for the majority of the year) was IU's inability to rebound. Mizzou out-rebounded the Hoosiers 46-28. The Tigers had 21 offensive boards to seven for IU. \nThere were times when it appeared that Kline was wearing anti-ball magnets on his hands (he had seven turnovers). But he can't be expected to do everything when playing against a frontcourt of three bigger guys. That's why it was surprising that IU's tallest player, Ewing, only played 12 minutes.\nUntil IU's opponents start getting considerably shorter, the Hoosiers are going to have to play 40 minutes of solid basketball every game. Right now, they aren't good enough to have any margin for error. Unless they plan on playing some postseason games this March.