#14 RU vs #17 Iowa Game Thread 1/23/19

[AreYouNUTS]

Can’t be upset with a tight loss on the road against a ranked conference foe.

 

[RUChoppin]

in the last quarter fouling wasnt the issue, its that we couldnt make a shot when it counted or make that needed stop...RU had it to 63-62 and Iowa got an easy layup on the next possession.

Players with 4 fouls play defense just as aggressively as those with 2, naturally.

 

[MADHAT1]

unhappy with losing, but RU is still a team to be proud of and losing to Iowa at their house isn't something that should start a brand new blame game on how the team messed up.

Every win is because things went right.
Stands to reason a loss will be because things didn't go as good as hoped for and you can say things just didn't work out like we wanted.

 

[APKnight]

How many points did Tina Napier score? I don’t believe we’ve ever won when she is the ref. 26-12 foul differential, 4-25 from 3, and yet we still came close to winning. We will definitely beat this team next time, handily. I would ask the B1G to ban her from reffing our games in the future, if that is even possible.

 

[RUJMM78]

This was a hard fought game which Rutgers could have won with better 3 point shooting and far better defense against Gustafson who scored 32 points.In contrast Rutgers best scorer Carey scored 10 points in the first quarter and only 7 more points for the rest of the game.I don't know why she got so few shots in the second half but clearly it was a deciding factor in the outcome of the game.

I consider both teams evenly matched and would not be surprised that Rutgers defeated Iowa in the B1G Tournament if that match up occurred .

 

[eso1989]

In the first half, particularly in the 2Q, I felt we rushed on offense. We were launching ill advised threes early in the shot clock instead of working the ball around for a better shot.

Iowa is a porous defensive team. The odds were if we made them play defense longer, we’d improve our chances for an easy bucket. Additionally, those missed threes led to long rebounds and several easy run-outs by Iowa (for layups). A particular sequence was when we were up by 6 and could have extended the lead then helped them tie it up with a 2-3 three point bricks early in the clock.

I was kind of surprised we didn’t press at all during the game. We did do a much better job in #10 in the second half. I feel if we play them again, we will make adjustments and win.

 

[RUChoppin]

A lot of hate for Tina Napier in this thread (and officiating in general), so I did some digging through old box scores back through the 2014-15 season.

Turns out Napier is far from the worst official we face when it comes to foul disparity (+4.4), and the games she calls are just a touch over our average foul disparity since joining the Big Ten (+3.6).

What was amazing, though, was how big the disparity is when we play Iowa:

1/23/19: RU 26, IA 12 (+14) - away; Napier, Roberts, Kantner
2/21/18: RU 27, IA 12 (+15) - home; Hall, Brooks, Trammell
2/02/17: RU 21, IA 6 (+15) - away; Bryan Enterline, Barb Smith, Forsberg
1/17/17: RU 20, IA 11 (+9) - home; Roberts, Kantner, Jones
1/04/16: RU 20, IA 5 (+15) - away; Vaszily, Suffern, Kantner
1/04/15: RU 20, IA 17 (+3) - home; Morris, Daley, Blauch

That's an average of 11.8 more fouls on us than on Iowa across 6 meetings. The next closest disparity against a Big Ten team is +7.1 vs. OSU, then +6.0 vs. Indiana. And on the road at Iowa it's +14.7, while at home it's just +9.

As far as individual refs that we regularly see that have high disparities, Bob Trammell is the worst with +7.3 average across 11 meetings (twice our normal differential), with 5 games reaching double digit differential in our opponents' favor and just 1 game with a disparity in our favor (called one more foul on Nebraska than us in Feb 2015).

Following after Trammel is Forsberg (avg +6.7 across 6 games), Cross (+6.5, 8 games), Dickerson (+6.4, 12 games), Kantner (+6.3, 12 games), Hall (+6.3, 9 games), and Roberts (+6.2, 12 games).

The referees that tend to have foul discrepancies lower than our average of +3.6 are Thompson (-0.4, 9 games), Resch (-0.3, 6 games), Spurlock (+0.1, 7 games), Gulbeyan (+0.7, 6 games), Bob Enterline (+0.8, 6 games), and Blauch (+1.6, 16 games).

So, for this game in particular, it's possible that Kantner and Roberts were more to blame for the disparity than Napier was.

 

[RC66]

Choppin, thanks for this analysis.

You should copy it over into its own thread for wider readership.

 

[RUChoppin]

Choppin, thanks for this analysis.

You should copy it over into its own thread for wider readership.

Good idea - I also added some more detail that wasn't as specific to this game.