08 February 2010

Recap: Northwestern 78 Indiana 61

Northwestern looked very much the part of an NCAA caliber team. Northwestern was in complete control of this game from wire-to-wire. After a rare NU win of the opening tip Drew Crawford juked his defender and slammed down a thunderous two handed jam for a 2-0 lead. Northwestern never looked back.

It took Northwestern (16-7, Big Ten 5-6) just over five minutes to build a double digit lead. For the rest of the game Northwestern cruised in a comfort zone. The lead grew to as many as 20 points while Indiana (9-13, 3-7) would get no closer than nine points.

It was a complete team effort for Northwestern. All five starters scratched out double digit scoring efforts, and Jeremy Nash added 10 rebounds for a double-double effort. The game was pretty clean as both teams combined for only 18 turnovers. The refs did their best to smudge up Northwestern's work of art and blew the whistle a painful 45 times for personal fouls.

This was the second consecutive Big Ten game that NU won by 15+ points. That is a feat that hasn't been accomplished since the 1950s. It wasn't the only notable accomplishment on the afternoon. As we wrote in our game preview, with the win NU now has a three game winning streak over the Hoosiers for the first time since 1933.

Expect more long standing records of futility to be broken this season and next. Hopefully NU will stay on track to snap that most embarrassing of streaks, the 0-for-NCAAs streak, this season. We don't know if we can take another year of the media beating that drum!