Indiana basketball suffered its first conference loss of the season on Wednesday, falling to Nebraska 86-70 on what was a woeful night for the Hoosiers defense. Nebraska led by as much as 22 points as Indiana allowed its third-most points in a game this season.
With a ton of roster turnover from last year's team, some bumps in the road are to be expected from the Hoosiers, but all of their problems seemed to come to the forefront in Wednesday's loss. Indiana turned the ball over 19 times and allowed Nebraska to jump out to a 15-point lead early in the second half as the Cornhuskers came out of the break with a 10-3 run.
Head coach Mike Woodson said that Indiana's defense has taken a few steps back from recent years and that it's ultimately on him to fix the team's issues.
“We’ve had some moments where we’ve been down in games and we’ve made some big-time runs it’s because of our defense,” Woodson said, per The Daily Hoosier. ‘This team is not as good as we were defensively the last two years, and a lot of it is because we do have new faces, but we’ve gotta overcome that.”
Winning on the road
It's never easy to win a game away from home, especially in a conference like the Big Ten. Woodson has been around long enough to know the way Indiana played on Wednesday won't result in a ton of success for the Hoosiers on the road.
Turnovers can kill a team and a typical key to winning on the road is containing the opponent’s best player. Nebraska's best player on Wednesday was Keisei Tominaga, who led all scorers with 28 points as the Cornhuskers secured their first win over the Hoosiers since 2019.
This will not be the last tough test Indiana basketball faces on the road this season and improvements need to be made if the Hoosiers are going to stay afloat in the Big Ten.
“When we’ve got our fan base we seem to play a little bit better,” Woodson said, “but it’s different on the road, and you’ve gotta do all the things right on the road to win basketball games and we didn’t do that tonight.”
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