With whistle after inexplicable whistle hounding Iowa's rotation of bigs into foul trouble, the formula for another collapse against Nebraska seemed to be materializing in Lincoln on Monday night.
Instead, Lucy Olsen had her best scoring game as a Hawkeye with 32 points, and the team channeled its frustrations from last month's home loss to the Huskers into a season-best shooting performance from deep to give Nebraska the blues. The Hawkeyes cruised, 81-66, and fully erased the sting of its earlier five-game losing streak with its fifth consecutive W in B1G play. Iowa now sits at 17-7 (7-6), tied for ninth in the conference with five games left in the regular season.
THE DEEP THREE
1. Lucy! Nobody on the Hawkeye roster had more incentive to flush last month's home collapse against Nebraska than Olsen, who had one of her worst games as a Hawkeye in that loss.
Monday, Olsen not only erased those bad memories, she left no doubt who the best guard on the floor was.
"It was a little bit of a revenge game," said Olsen. "None of us were happy that we lost the first time, and we don't get to play teams twice in the Big Ten too much."
Olsen was cooking early and often, with 12 of Iowa's 16 first-quarter points. Indeed, Iowa never trailed in the win, staking an 11-2 lead out of the gate and never letting the Huskers lead. Even when Nebraska fought back in the second quarter to tie the game up at 24-24, Iowa immediately responded with a 9-0 run — sparked by an Olsen and-one.
Olsen was simply unguardable Monday, and everyone in the arena knew it. Nobody — nobody -- in red could deny Olsen's first step on dribble drives, and she finished 8-for-13 inside the arc, including 6-for-8 at the rim.
Olsen's dominance also included a 4-for-7 performance from behind the arc, her third time with four triples for the Hawkeyes and her eighth in her college career. All told, Olsen finished with a preposterous 32-6-7 stat line — making her only the second Iowa player since 2009 to record a 30-5-5 stat line, joining little-known former guard Caitlin Clark.
"When [Olsen] plays free like that, she's just really a tremendous player," said Jensen. "It gives us so much confidence, and it sets the tone."
With Nebraska unable to keep Iowa's point guard from driving at will, the Husker defense had to rotate off its assignments to protect the rim, and Iowa responded with a season-high 12 three-pointers in the win. Five of those belonged to Taylor McCabe (all in the second half, including this ) in a triumphant return to the Fremont, Nebraska native's homeland.
While Olsen has a more-than-capable backup in freshman Aaliyah Guyton, Jensen left her senior transfer on the floor all 40 minutes in the win, letting Guyton operate off the ball instead. Olsen probably can't put in these ironwoman performances with much regularity — she'll need some life left in her legs as Iowa inches ever closer to turning its NCAA dreams into reality -- but it was effective on Monday night.
2. Heiden! Iowa's switch to small-ball has accomplished two things. One: turning the entire season around. Two: effectively turning freshman center Ava Heiden into the most talented DNP-CD in the Big Ten.
Yet if there were any ill effect on Heiden's ability to contribute in a game, it didn't show Monday, as she was pressed into heavy minutes with some questionable foul trouble to Hannah Stuelke and Addison O'Grady against Nebraska forward Alexis Markowski. Heiden responded to her 10 first-half minutes with six points on 3-of-4 shooting while helping hold Markowski in check.
"If you would have told me we had all that foul trouble in that first quarter, not even the first half, and still be able to come out in a really tough place to play with the W?" Jensen asked rhetorically. "Man. I don't know if I would have believed it."
Heiden would have been an excellent candidate for minutes Monday, regardless of the foul situation ahead of her; the freshman center's length and fast-twitch athleticism posed a unique challenge for the 6'3" Markowski, who finished with 15 points but only had eight until chips-and-salsa time in the fourth quarter.
"Everyone on the bench is good," said Olsen. "If we're in foul trouble, I'm not worried because we're just a really deep team and our freshmen are good. Everyone that came off the bench really played well [today]."
Heiden's debut wasn't perfect — she's also the most easily jostled of the three posts, and finished with just one rebound in 13 total minutes of play. With Nebraska's size in the interior, that's not the most shocking result for a true freshman, but it is an object lesson that this sort of physicality is just part of life in the Big Ten.
3. Zebras! There's no more tiresome topic in postgame analysis than the referees. Officiating is orders of magnitude more difficult than the average fan understands, and that's before the pervasive verbal abuse. Complaining about the referees is like complaining about the weather — the domain of dullards and children.
Kids, dullards, your day has come.
On Monday night, the officials flew straight past inconsistency into incompetence, and to a breathtaking degree. To an extent, they "did their job," insofar as they didn't affect the outcome of the game in any material way. But make no mistake: they (or the Big Ten) probably owe Jensen a thank-you card for the game not being in doubt.
The foul trouble that plagued Sydney Affolter, Stuelke and O'Grady (all finishing with four on the night) involved multiple phantom calls, and that's a polite way to describe them. Nebraska was, on balance, the more physical defensive team Monday, yet still managed to get to the free throw line 15 (fifteen) more times than Iowa.
To the extent that the referees' whistles Monday were actually indicative of whether a foul had been committed, the next adventure was sometimes who the call would be on. At one point, Markowski fell over during a double-team and drew a foul on Affolter, who didn't appear to actually touch Markowski on replay. Iowa players were routinely mystified by calls, and at one point Affolter could be seen talking
Of course, absent a series of checks with "FOR THROWING THE GAME, LOVE, THE BIG TEN" in the memo, there's no evidence to suggest this was a deliberate attempt by the referees to throw the game in Nebraska's favor, because there's no evidence that they were officiating competently enough to execute that sort of plan. The Huskers got hosed on a few calls too, in fact — not to the same extent as the Hawkeyes, but enough to make clear that this was just an awful performance through-and-through by the zebras.
Worth repeating, though: they did their job, because the better team won Monday.
NEXT: Iowa comes back to Carver-Hawkeye Arena Thursday night to host Rutgers (10-14, 2-11). That game will be streamed only on BTN+, with tipoff set for 6:30 PM CT.
