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The Indiana Daily Student

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No. 16 IU drops conference opener against Nebraska

Junior Robert Johnson dribbles the ball down the court. IU defeated SEMO 83-55.

IU’s defense of its Big Ten Conference title began with a thud.

In its first conference game of the season, No. 16 IU saw its 26-game home winning streak snapped at the hands of Nebraska.

The Cornhuskers stunned IU and knocked off the Hoosiers 87-83 Wednesday at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall.

Nebraska came out fighting from the start. The Cornhuskers would get out to a 12-point lead midway through the first half.

“I think as a group we did not come out with the right mindset,” junior guard Rob Johnson said. “Definitely myself included, I think we thought it was probably going to be a little more easier than it was going to be. You can’t come out like that, especially in the Big Ten. I think it was a mindset thing.”

Johnson tried desperately to save IU in the first half, hitting back-to-back threes to close the gap to two for the Hoosiers.

IU fought back from the early first-half deficit and went in the halftime up three, showing a response in the first half that the Hoosiers did not show in its prior losses to Fort Wayne and Butler.

But Johnson was already in foul trouble and just a few minutes into the second half, he picked up his fourth foul and had to sit down.

That would doom IU’s offense as Johnson had been the rudder for the Hoosiers in the first half, scoring 13 points. Without him in the second half for a large stretch of time, IU’s offense just couldn’t find a rhythm and Nebraska got out to another substantial lead that IU would have to claw to come back from.

Like in the loss to Butler, IU’s defense wasn’t in peak form.

“They ran some good stuff, but I don’t think it was more the offense than our defense,” Johnson said. “Like I said, we left a lot of shots unchallenged especially for some of their better shooters. You can’t expect to win when you do things like that.”

Nebraska’s offense was able to hit eight of 10 shots at one point in the second half, extending its lead.

“To me they did a great job and they made more plays than we did,” IU Coach Tom Crean said. “It’s bewildering to me that we’re having trouble challenging shots. I’m not sure what the numbers are, but there are too many times we didn’t get a hand up. Whether we were man or we were zone, we had to do some things to get the penetration stopped, but we didn’t challenge shots enough.”

With sophomore forward Juwan Morgan out of the game with a shoulder injury, IU would make another run late to regain the lead. Morgan returned to the bench with a wrap on his right shoulder but didn’t play. Crean said postgame that Morgan’s injury is just a bruise.

However, neither IU’s defense nor its offense was able to make enough plays to win the game down the stretch.

After dropping an extremely winnable game against Nebraska, IU now stares down a difficult two-game stretch against No. 6 Louisville and No. 14 Wisconsin.

“And I'm real comfortable being in it like this," Crean said. “I'm real comfortable when you hit adversity. I'm good with that. We'll figure out how to overcome it.”

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