INDIANAPOLIS — Senior center Jenn Anderson opened the third quarter with a layup.
It seemed simple enough, looked and felt like more of the same dominant first-half performance the Hoosiers had put together, and extended the IU lead to 17 points.
In the next nine and a half minutes, however, IU women's basketball would score just four points as rival Purdue stormed back to tie and ultimately win the Big Ten Tournament quarterfinal matchup at Bankers Life Fieldhouse by a final of 66-60.
A seven-minute scoreless streak in which IU missed 11 consecutive field goal attempts allowed Purdue to get itself back into the game in the third quarter. Afterward, IU Coach Teri Moren said the six turnovers her team committed in the first five minutes of the third quarter were crucial.
"Most of their scoring came throughout transition," Moren said of Purdue's 19 points in the third. "We turned it over too much. The game was ours to go get, and we didn't complete the task."
Purdue Coach Sharon Versyp said she changed up the defensive strategy coming out of the break and started having her players switch who they were guarding on all ball screens that didn't involve the 6-foot-3 Anderson. It worked.
The Hoosiers shot just two-of-17 from the field in the third quarter and made just six of their 14 layup attempts in the second half.
Junior guard Tyra Buss, who had 14 first-half points but made just one of her eight shots in the final two quarters, said the defensive adjustment by Purdue affected IU.
"I could definitely tell they were switching one through four," Buss said. "We just didn't find open players."
Freshman guard Dominique Oden sparked Purdue's resurgence in the second half. She scored 16 points in the final two quarters and finished with a game-high 24. Oden said she and the rest of the Boilermakers reevaluated their mindsets at halftime when they trailed the Hoosiers 39-24.
"You look at yourself and you're like, 'We shouldn't be in this situation because we know we're better than this,'" Oden said. "That's why when we came out the second half we played like we did."
Moren said her team's entire offense devolved once Purdue changed up its look on the defensive end. Purdue's dominant defense was nothing new. Purdue allowed just 58.4 points per game to opponents this season, the fewest in the Big Ten.
After the Hoosiers shot a blistering 50 percent from both the field and behind the arc in the first half, it would have been difficult to foresee the offensive problems they struggled through the rest of the way.
"We got out of sync," Moren said. "We really did. We were making play calls on the sideline over there, and there were times that we were doing things that they're not in our sets."
While IU missed shots throughout the third, Purdue wasn't exactly making up the deficit at a quick pace. In fact, the Hoosiers maintained a lead throughout the entire quarter, and didn't let the game slip away for good until late in the fourth.
The fact remains that the bulk of the damage was done in the third, when the Boilermakers outscored the Hoosiers 19-6 and took all the momentum headed into the fourth. In just 10 short minutes right after halftime, Purdue came out, attacked IU on both ends of the floor and never looked back.
All the while, the Hoosiers kept shooting, but nothing fell for them. At the end of the day, the loss boiled down to those misses, Moren said.
"We never capitalized and took advantage of them missing," Moren said. "We continued to miss unlike the first half. And that third quarter really hurt us."
