While a feisty Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall crowd belted their voices around him, Al Durham stepped up to the free-throw line.
The sophomore IU guard stood, dribbled the ball three times, spun it into the air and grasped it with his right palm, before calmly making his free throw.
The crowd exploded with noise.
Durham quickly followed his first made free throw with another, and the noise came again.
It took more than seven minutes for IU to score a point Friday night as No. 5 Michigan began its 69-46 win against the Hoosiers with a 17-0 scoring run.
“Our team in general right now is soft,” IU Head Coach Archie Miller said. “We're also, for whatever reason right now, scared. And you can just tell by the way that we played.”
By the time Durham made those two free throws, IU’s fans were all too happy to erupt in ironic cheers. Pent up anticipation turned to disappointment for the announced sell-out crowd as the Michigan trio of freshman forward Ignas Brazdeikis, junior center Jon Teske and junior guard Zavier Simpson combined for 43 points and 16 rebounds.
By comparison, IU, now 12-8 overall and 3-6 in conference games, had its top three scorers combine for just 32 points.
“The fight isn't there right now,” Miller said. “The confidence isn't there on either end of the floor to be able to capitalize on any type of opportunity that we have, to be honest with you. There's nothing we're doing well.”
Frequent malfunctions with the arena shot clocks meant officials stopped and started the game during the first half, but the Hoosier offense continually misfired with and without it.
IU went a woeful five of 25 from the field in the opening period, missing nine of its 10 three-point shots. Senior forward Juwan Morgan was the only Hoosier to make more than one basket, while six Hoosiers missed at least two shots.
“I would say it’s embarrassing,” Morgan said of the overall game performance. “I don’t think any team is 23 points better than us. I’m angry about it, I know every guy in that room is.”
Conference play has seen IU make just 41.2 percent of its field goals and 25.2 percent of its 3-pointers, statistics that are both worse than IU’s opponents through nine Big Ten games.
Against Michigan, IU was 16-58 from the field and 3-20 from three-point range, as Miller opted to played a main rotation of just six players in the second half.
“I feel like we’re putting the reps in,” Durham said. “I feel like these guys are going to knock them down, sooner or later."
A trademark feature of IU's six-game slide has been a brief second-half resurgence, and Friday was no different.
A 15-point halftime deficit was narrowed to nine points with 16:47 remaining. But as it did against IU at the Crisler Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in early January, Michigan had a direct response.
In this case, it was a 12-3 Michigan scoring run over the next five minutes, featuring seven points from senior guard Charles Matthews, to put the game beyond the reach of Miller’s team, one that is fast entering free fall mode toward the midway mark of Big Ten play.
“We've got to put our big boy pants on here and start showing up,” Miller said. “There's no real answers. It's just work.”
