This year’s Iowa team is somewhat unusual in that it has been very good in certain defensive statistical categories (including turnovers and defending three-point shots) but very poor in other categories (such as defending two-point shots and rebounding). The issue of defending the defensive glass is today's focus. For the purposes of this discussion, we'll be looking at the percentage of Iowa opponent misses on which they allow an offensive rebound. To read the breakdown of Iowa's struggles this season on the offensive glass, check out my previous article.

READ MORE: Iowa MBB's Rebounding Woes, Part I: Offensive Rebounding

Iowa is allowing opponents to collect offensive rebounds on 33% of their misses which ranks 299th nationally. This is the worst mark of the Fran McCaffery era. If the Hawkeyes could get that rankingup to a still-pretty-bad 180th, it would equate to a defensive improvement of roughly 0.02 points per possession -- jumping them from 89th to 72nd in overall defensive efficiency.

Rebounding is a challenging subject for root-cause analysis because there are so many factors that are hard to measure. For example, if you are going up against a good offensive rebounder, you might prioritize boxing him out over actually going for the rebound yourself. You might end up with very few rebounds yourself but contribute greatly to your team’s rebounding efforts in this way.

So the stats that we have easy access to (the rebounding rates for individual players) don’t necessarily tell the whole story. Successful box-outs aren't reported in any box score that I've ever seen. Likewise, the number of players that the opponent sends to the offensive glass on misses will have a major impact on your defensive rebounding success and this isn't tracked either.

As a result, in addition to my usual statistical analyses, I closely re-watched the Iowa State game to use it as a case study in an effort to figure out why the Hawkeyes have been struggling on the defensive glass.