With the only away win coming against Purdue, IU has found itself road blocked

IOWA CITY, IOWA -- The saying goes, "Home is where the heart is."\nBut in the Hoosiers case, home is only where the wins are. \nWith the Hoosiers down seven points, 53-46, with 6 minutes and 42 seconds left in Saturday's Big Ten battle against No. 23 Iowa, IU looked to be back in a ball game they previously struggled to be a part of.\nBut then Iowa's junior Jeff Horner started the storm. \nHe hit a three pointer to get the Carver-Hawkeye crowd of 14,364 alive and going. Then two trips down the court later, he tossed an alley-oop pass to fellow junior Doug Thomas, who dunked over two Hoosiers. \nThe Hawkeyes never looked back.\n"(I) just felt like we didn't play with the intensity we needed to play with, from a toughness standpoint," IU coach Mike Davis said.\nAfter their 72-57 loss at Iowa, Saturday afternoon, the Hoosiers' record dropped to 9-9 overall, and 4-3 in the Big Ten. Iowa improves to 15-5 on the season, and 3-4 in league play. \nThe Hoosiers road woes continue, as their record fell to 1-4 on the year and 1-2 in conference play, with their only win coming at Purdue on Jan. 15.\nAll season long, IU coach Mike Davis stressed that in Big Ten play, it is important to hold home court, but win one or two on the road.\n"It's road games, it's road games," he said. "Every loss you have is disappointing but it's a road loss. And what we have to do is make sure to take care of home court and try to steal a game on the road."\nBanging and battling down low, freshman D.J. White ended the game leading IU with 23 points and seven rebounds -- only one coming in the second half. \n"It was a very physical game -- a lot of pushing, a lot of driving," White said. "It was just one of those games."\nBracey Wright's struggles from behind the arc continued, as the junior guard missed all of his three-point attempts for the second game in a row. Wright went 0-4, finishing a 0-14 week from behind the three-point line. He shot 4 of 8 from the field against Iowa and ended with 10 points, before fouling out with 1:24 remaining.\n"I thought every last one of them was going to go in tonight," Wright said. "In the first half I got a lot of open looks." \nLife on the road is never easy, but especially in conference play, for the young players who have never seen Big Ten crowds before. \n"It's tough when you have players who are young and have never played on the road in that type of environment before," Davis said. "Things aren't happening and you can see they get a little nervous or whatever and you look up and you were down five and now you're down 15 or 20."\nFor the first four and half minutes, Saturday's game looked like a typical Big Ten battle. The score was bouncing between teams, with one not able to secure a sizable spread until Iowa went on a 13-2 run to pull ahead 24-14 with 11 minutes left in the first half. But the spurt was cut short when guard Marshall Strickland rattled off five straight points to cut the lead to seven as part of a short 7-2 IU run.\n"We had stretches when we don't play hard for 40 minutes," White said. "Some times we play hard in stretches and sometimes we go dead. I mean, that's a part of what we got to learn. We got to play hard for 40 minutes. That's part of growing up." \nDavis believes that the experience his young basketball team is gaining on the road will help them grow up the most now, and benefit them in future games. \n"Going to Northwestern, Purdue and Minnesota and even here today, you've seen a different basketball team then what you've seen in our home games," Davis said. "The crowd seems to get to us a little bit. That's a great experience for us, as a young basketball team, to be able to learn some things on the road. That's going to help us when we're going to go play at Ohio State, at Michigan, at Wisconsin and Illinois."\nDavis added an unfamiliar face to his rotation Saturday when senior guard Donald Perry saw his first action of the year, backing up junior guard Marshall Strickland.\nStrickland ended a perfect shooting night with 10 points on 4 of 4 shooting and including his only three pointer of the game. \n"Right when we let up, that's when we're at our worst," Strickland said. "This team has to play really aggressive and really hard all the time to be good."\nStrickland said it doesn't matter where the Hoosiers go, they don't get affected by the fans, the arena or being away from home.\n"I don't think it's up to the venue," he said. "I don't think the road is hurting us. I think it's just when we play with energy, were a tough team to play against."\nSenior Donald Perry said the team as a whole is not doing what it needs to win games. \n"Its got nothing to do with the road," Perry said. "Its road and home. Every night we're not really executing what we need to be like. We're making spurts. We're playing some good teams and we got a young team. So when we're on the road, we can't have that many mental mistakes or all those stretches where you're not getting the basketball. We just got to eliminate that."\nStrickland agreed with Perry. The junior guard said playing with their heads is as important as playing with their feet.\n"We're not as sharp as we need to be on the road," junior Marshall Strickland said. "On the road you need to play against the other team, the fans and all the other circumstances. We weren't able to be as rough and tough as we wanted to be, so we had to play with our heads (Saturday)."\nEven though no conference opponent has come into Assembly Hall and left with a win, teams go away from campus and return victorious -- something that IU wants to start doing.\n"The message is, we want to win every game," Strickland said. "We see teams win on the road every day and we think we are good enough to do that."\n-- Contact Staff Writer Josh Weinfuss at jweinfus@indiana.edu.