The early evening of basketball is keeping the Lunatic busy. I finish the blog of one game that is exciting, and the next one then tries to top it. It once again proves that the Lunatic can not handicap games.
I mentioned in my handicapping blog that I had seen this before. I mentioned how while Duke blows out teams, TCU had not been beating by double digits very often and then the Blue Devils go on a 30-10. Florida blows teams out, and so even though Iowa has experience against tough teams, expect Florida to run away like Duke did.
Except Iowa came to play – the Hawkeyes ruled the first half and took a 2 point lead into halftime. And then the Hawkeyes came out of the locker room on fire. 6 minutes into the half, Cooper Koch hit a three pointer to force the Gators to call timeout as Iowa suddenly had a 12 point lead.
The Gators used the timeout well – as they started their spark. And around the 7 minute mark, Isaiah Brown and Alex Condon hit back-to-back dunks to give the Gators a 60-58 lead. One had to figure that this was when the defending champions would run away.
Except they didn’t. With about 4 minutes, Iowa’s Cooper Koch hit a three-pointer to give the Hawkeyes a lead. But the Gators would play good defense, get some free throws and have Alex Condon make a layup to give Florida a 3 point lead. With about 2 minutes left, Tavion Banks would cut the lead down to 1 with a nice dunk, only to have the Gators come right back down the court and get a layup from Xaivian Lee.
After running the shot clock down, Florida’s Boogie Fland drove the lane and looked like the Iowa defender hit the ball out of his hands. But Iowa challenged the call, and it was ruled that the ball was last off of Fland. Iowa took advantage of it, by getting the ball to their star, Bennett Stirtz – who drove to the lane and hit a jumper to cut the lead back to 1.
Florida tried to take some time off the clock, but they ended up having to take a long three-pointer, which Thomas Haugh missed, and suddenly, Iowa had a chance to take the lead. Bennett Stirtz drove the lane, was defended well, and Stirtz threw up a wild shot in the lane that missed with 11 seconds. Isaiah Brown would get the defensive rebound and was immediately fouled.
But Brown missed the first free throw. After hitting the second one, Florida called time out to try to set up their defense with a 2 point lead.
Iowa made a nice pass in to Stirtz who caught the ball already at full speed heading down the court, and it looked like he would drive all the way down the court. But once he got near the three-point line, he passed the ball into the corner to Alvaro Folgueiras, who took a step back to make sure both feet were behind the three-point line, and drilled the shot to give the Hawkeyes a one-point lead with 4.5 seconds left.
Xaivian Lee would get the ball on a full sprint and drove all the way down the court with Kael Combs trying to stay in front of him. As Lee got to the basket, Alvaro Folgueiras doubled and both him and Combs jumped to block Lee’s layup. Realizing he had no chance to make it, Lee tried to pass it to Thomas Haugh since that was the man that Folgueiras left to try to block the shot. But the ball hit Haugh’s feet as the buzzer went off. Even if Haugh was able to catch the wild pass, there would have been no time to get a shot off.
And in a tournament where the favorites seem to be advancing, the first #1 team falls in the Round of 32 as the #9 seed Iowa Hawkeyes knock off the defending champions to advance to the Sweet 16 in Houston.