Northwestern 90, Iowa 71

Can I revise my cautious prediction of five to eight Big Ten victories for the Hawks? Is it possible for me to lower the range to two to five, with heavy emphasis on the two?

No. Now that conference play has started I need to stick with my original prognostication and admit I may not have been cautious enough.

Though the Hawks may be a head better then they were last year, the conference is head and shoulders (and probably arms and abdomen) tougher, wiser, and more talented — more so than I expected. It is great for the conference, but bad for the Hawks. As my dad and I exited Carver after the game tonight (of course we stayed for the whole whipping), I told him, “We are not in the same league.”

I thought the Hawks had a chance to get their first conference win, but suspected something amiss during the pregame shoot around. The Wildcats were on the court shooting long before the Hawks were, and the only shots they took were behind the arc. All they practiced were threes — and they drained them by the truckload. It seemed the only balls that did not fall cleanly through the net were those knocked away by other shots heading toward the bucket. On the other end of the court, when the Hawks finally emerged from the tunnel: bricks, air balls, and lazy layups. The Hawks have become better shooters this year, but it did not show pregame. After the tip and a quick 4-0 Iowa lead, the ‘Cats truly went wild from behind the arc.

If it was not for a gutsy 25-point effort from point guard Bryce Cartwright, the Hawks’s offense was dead in the water. Matt Gatens notched 20 points, but, for the most part, the Hawks looked to be channeling their inner Lickliter. There was very little off-the-ball movement and way too much dribbling; while Cartwright or Gatens worked the perimeter, trying to attract attention and find openings in the Northwestern defense, everyone else became statues. The Hawks’s defense was not much better. The Wildcats’s Princeton offense lulled our pressure zone to sleep and gave shooters open looks at the basket. The Hawks switched to man-to-man in the waning minutes of the first half and stopped the Wildcats’s roll with impressive defense, but that was the only bright spot for the white jerseys on the other end of the court.

With 10 minutes left in the second half, fans started leaving.

I will say, though, 71 points is not a bad effort. The point of the game, however, is to score points more than your opponent, and 71 was not enough.

Adjustments need to be made on both ends of the court, and Fran McCaffery needs to give his players short-term amnesia so they can put the last two performances behind them. The Hawks’s next two games (at Minnesota and at Ohio State) may also be ugly, but you never know. Right now, if the Hawks are this overmatched, I think the only games they have a good chance of winning are the home contests with Indiana and Michigan. However, the Wolverines are deadly from behind the arc, too, but I consider them equal, if not a little better, than the Hawks. Matching, or even eclipsing, last season’s 10-win total may be tough.