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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

sports

COLUMN: Hoosiers now at the mercy of the Committee

There is nothing left for the IU men’s basketball team to do but wait and hope.

IU can’t alter its RPI, SOS, BPI or any other initialed statistic. It just has to hope the resume it built early in the season is enough to send the Hoosiers to the NCAA Tournament.

After Maryland edged out IU for the second time this season, the Hoosiers fall to the mercy of the selection committee to decide whether they are worthy of a berth in the nation’s premier college basketball tournament. 

If the Hoosiers are selected, it won’t be due to any recent success. IU has only won just five of its last 14 games, and three of those were against Rutgers and Northwestern. 

The other two were against Michigan and Minnesota, which aren’t exactly quality wins either. That’s going to be hard for the selection committee to forget.

Over the final 12 games before the Big Ten Tournament, IU didn’t play like a team that deserved to dance. They were sloppy and showed resemblances to last year’s team that played without passion at times.

However, the last two games have confirmed what IU showed until halfway through the Big Ten schedule: this team is good enough to play in the NCAA Tournament.

Maryland will likely be around a No. 3 seed come tournament time, and the Hoosiers had a good chance of victory until the final minute. 

IU just couldn’t seem to overtake Maryland’s lead in the second half. They pulled close several times, but the Terrapins answered each call. 

Of course, it’s tough to win any game when your opponent has the kryptonite to your second-best scorer.

Freshman guard James Blackmon Jr. must not like playing Maryland. In the last two games against the Terrapins, Blackmon has shot 4-of-26 (15.4%) from the field for six points. 

However, one Hoosier who stepped up when IU needed him most was freshman forward Emmitt Holt. With junior forward Hanner Mosquera-Perea on the bench due to his injury yesterday, Holt contributed 25 tough, gritty minutes of action on Friday. 

Holt finished with a career-high 12 rebounds and said he more comfortable on the floor in the Big Ten Tournament than he has all season. 

That parallels the entire team – IU looked as good as they have all year this weekend and were just a couple points away from sealing their spot in the NCAA Tournament.

This is the first season since Tom Crean has been at IU that the Hoosiers don’t know their postseason fate. In 2011-12 and 2012-13, IU was a lock and in every other season, it was a guaranteed miss. 

But this time around, the Hoosiers are riding the bubble, hoping they’ve done enough.

I think they did. IU’s quality wins are many and their bad losses are few. They lost a lot of games down the stretch, but the committee doesn’t look at when wins and losses happen.

If the committee watched IU this weekend, they know what the Hoosiers are capable of and that is definitely worthy of a berth. Experts are split on whether the Hoosiers are in or out and a lot depends on how other bubble teams do. 

Let’s just say it will be a stressful Sunday.

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