Mighty Proud of the Effort Tonight

storminspank

storminspank

Justin VanLaere
Iowa was down almost 20 on the road in the Breslin Center - a house of horrors for the Hawkeyes. One of the most undermanned Iowa teams headed to one of the better MSU team's house and stuck with them. Never gave up. This really is a game to build on no matter how much you don't want to accept moral victories. This is the best Iowa has played in East Lansing since before I was in high school.

Very proud of the Iowa Hawkeyes tonight.
 
Clearly MSU and Izzo let up......right???

No, great game.....this team just lacks depth. If everyone stays with the addition of next year's class, this team will be alot better!
 
I enjoyed tonights game as much as any game since Horner and Brunner were suiting up! There has been definite improvement over the past month....I suspect it will continue. I like the attitude these kids are adopting...us against the world and we're going to work our butts off.....Fuller really coming into his own, Payne is tough and improving, Gatens taking over at times.....we are improving and I for one am looking forward to the remainder of the season and next!
 
MSU did let up--two or three times they began playing as though the game was over. But that doesn't detract from the fact that Iowa kept fighting and played better down the stretch, rather than going through the motions. I was very proud of them tonight.
 
FreddyBrown said:
MSU did let up--two or three times they began playing as though the game was over. But that doesn't detract from the fact that Iowa kept fighting and played better down the stretch, rather than going through the motions. I was very proud of them tonight.
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Maybe the players foolishly let up, but Izzo didn't, which he made clear in his post game interview!!!
 
If we can play night in and night out like we played the first 10 minutes tonight, we will definitely win some games. I loved some of the looks we got on offense and i thought the defense did a pretty good job of creating turnovers.
 
gdshawkeye09 said:
If we can play night in and night out like we played the first 10 minutes tonight, we will definitely win some games. I loved some of the looks we got on offense and i thought the defense did a pretty good job of creating turnovers.
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Definitely. I still expect some rough nights, but play like tonight will definitely earn some W's. I just hope the team can keep it up and get more and more consistent.
 
ForeverHawk said:
Maybe the players foolishly let up, but Izzo didn't, which he made clear in his post game interview!!!
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Actually Izzo did let up in a sense, in two ways:

First, as the announcers noted during the game, even before it was (temporarily) a blowout Izzo was playing young players in situations they don't typically see for MSU. Sherman and Dahlman were examples they mentioned, IIRC. Nothing wrong with that, but it suggests that Izzo expected to win the game handily.

Second, Izzo said in the same postgame interview that he decided to let the players stay out there and make their mistakes tonight (my rough paraphrase) because they needed to learn a lesson, that they have a long way to go before they can compete at the highest level. When you come close to losing to Iowa at Breslin, I'd say that could serve as a pretty effective lesson.

Neither of those things is unusual for a coach to do in a game like this, nor is it unusual that the MSU players did lose some intensity/concentration when they got the big leads. But so what if we didn't get MSU's very best effort? They're still a great team, and our guys still showed a lot by hanging in there and making a game out of it.
 
I was pretty impressed with the run they made after being down 40 - 58 I think. I missed the first half because I wasn't home from work yet. I would have like to have seen those first 10 minutes.
 
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