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Inside the Hall's Alex Bozich offers up five takeaways from Indiana's disconcerting 77-63 home loss to Iowa. The Hoosiers lacked urgency, Alex writes, against a team that "didn't even need to play its best game to beat the Hoosiers handily in Assembly Hall. ... Most projections still have the Hoosiers in, but on the current trajectory, an appearance in the big dance would likely be short lived. Indiana hasn’t put together solid, back-to-back performance in over a month and it’s unrealistic to believe that will change. Saturday’s game with Michigan State presents Indiana with a chance to stop the negative momentum and close out the regular season with a strong performance. Or it could be more of what happened against Iowa, which would signal that this team doesn’t have much fight left in it. As I wrote on Twitter last night, it’s one thing to play well and get beat. The type of performance Indiana had against Iowa, however, is inexcusable." Most disconcerting, at least for the long-term state of the program: Assembly Hall's sudden swath of empty seats.
Everywhere but Bloomington, Tuesday made for a fantastic night of college hoops. Kentucky nearly succumbed to -- and then consummately handled -- a more-than-game Georgia team on the road, reaching a 30-0 record in the process. Then, at 9 p.m. ET, Kansas (missing Perry Ellis) outlasted a gritty Mountaineers team (missing a bunch of key pieces), one that nonetheless pushed the Jayhawks to overtime on the road. The Lawrence Journal-World's Gary Bedore put together a comprehensive gamer from a win that earned KU its outright Big 12 title, their 11th-straight (outright or shared). Bill Self all but called it one of the greatest wins of his career: “I would say that’s as good a win as we ever had here,” Self stated. “We’ve not had a better win here for higher stakes than what that was. You can’t get anything going and the kids figure out a way to do it. It’s pretty special to sit there and see those guys pull it off. We found a way to do it.” Meanwhile, the weirdest stat in college basketball lived to fight another day.
March is an amazing month. It's also a profoundly surreal one, if you happen to cover this sport for a living. For starters, there are the waves of casual fans who suddenly pay attention to your work (which is awesome) and waves of casual fans who suddenly pay attention to your work and think they understand it better than you do, and tell you so (which is less awesome). Then there are the emails. Oh, the emails. No product is too obscure, or too unrelated to basketball, to land in our inbox with some sort of NCAA tournament tie-in. Apps! Experts! Something something basketball! Already this month, we received a pitch from some diet start-up about how stressing over your favorite team's games leads you to eat more unhealthy foods, or something. It's insane. Which is a long way of saying we typically look askance at marketing-driven NCAA tournament-related links this time of year … but this TicketCity state-by-state host site breakdown was pretty cool.
ESPN.com's Myron Medcalf honors the 25th anniversary of Loyola Marymount great Hank Gathers' death with a feature on the impact Gathers' sudden passing had on his family and friends.