IU earns first Big Ten victory

With usual starter Jeremy Hollowell sitting on the bench in his warm-ups for the entire game, IU (11-5, 1-2) used a balanced scoring attack and production off the bench to defeat Penn State (9-8, 0-4) 79-76 on Saturday.

IU Coach Tom Crean said it was a big win. In the team’s 16th game of the season, IU escaped State College, Pa., with a victory that was both the Hoosiers’ first win on the road and their first in the Big Ten.

“We tell our team this is the hardest playing team in the league,” Crean said. “There’s no question about it.”

On a day in which most sports fans in Happy Valley were focused on the introductory news conference of Penn State’s new football coach, James Franklin, the Nittany Lions’ basketball team made the most of its home court advantage, jumping out to a 17-4 lead.

Penn State started the game 5-of-5 from the field, with three 3-pointers during that run.
IU freshman forward Noah Vonleh single-handedly kept the Hoosiers in the game when his teammates missed their first seven shots. Vonleh scored the team’s first 12 points.

He showed his versatility by scoring in the low post on layups, making free throws and knocking down an open 3-pointer from the wing.

When the Haverhill, Mass., native went on a dry spell lasting more than 15 minutes, his teammates were there to take over the scoring load.

Sophomore point guard Kevin “Yogi” Ferrell and freshman guard Stanford Robinson led a 12-4 run to cut Penn State’s lead to 41-37 at halftime.

Senior forward Will Sheehey made a 3-pointer with 16:38 remaining in the second half to give IU its first lead of the game
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Two of the Hoosiers’ bench players made valuable contributions in crunch time.

Senior walk-on forward Jeff Howard, who averaged 7.5 minutes of playing time in his 10 previous appearances this season, scored four points and grabbed three rebounds in the final 10 minutes.

“Jeff Howard doesn’t know when he’s going in, and when Jeff Howard went in there, Jeff Howard was ready to go,” Crean said. “I think he kept us moving in a direction with getting to the foul line and with being active and being where he needed to be.”

After Penn State junior guard D.J. Newbill made a pair of free throws to take a two-point lead in the game’s closing minutes, sophomore forward Austin Etherington pump-faked, sending his defender flying past him, before rising up and making a 3-pointer in the corner.

Crean described Etherington’s shot as “monstrous.”

“He’s a battler, he’s scrappy and really, because he hasn’t played a lot, the confidence is going to go one way or the other in the game,” he said. “The fact that he went in there and his confidence grew like it did to the point where he could knock down that shot in the corner was huge.”

With Penn State starters graduate student guard Tim Frazier and sophomore forward Donovan Jack fouling out in the second half, Newbill led PSU’s comeback attempt.

He scored the team’s final six points but was unable to connect on his game-tying 3-point attempt with one second left.

“They really earned the victory,” Crean said. “When two teams fight like that, you can’t say that you deserved it but when you get it the way we did, you can say that you earned it.”  

Follow men’s basketball reporter Andy Wittry on Twitter @AndyWittry.