How Iowa State keeps getting into these up three, to foul or not to foul situations is simply mind-boggling. It happened yet again on Friday night as the Cyclones had an 85-82 lead over Iowa with 12 seconds on the clock. That’s when Iowa head coach Fran McCaffrey called 30-second time out.
Would Iowa State be Ben McLemore’d once again?
“It’s kind of embarrassing to say but we were going to foul,” an exhausted Fred Hoiberg said after the game. “We were going to foul but for some reason we decided not to. I guess the guys on the backside thought that the foul was going to occur so they didn’t guard over there.”
As a result, Iowa’s Zach McCabe had a wide-open 3-point attempt from the left wing, which he luckily missed as time expired.
“I am still shaking just a little bit because I expected that thing to go in,” Hoiberg said. “The fans were loud and the rim was going to be shaking a little bit and it bounced out.”
Miss or no miss, Iowa State still failed to execute in a game determining stage of Friday night’s Cy-Hawk thriller.
“I just told them that we’ve got two hours of practice of late game situations on Monday,” Hoiberg said.
No thanks
Former Iowa State head coach Tim Floyd is quite possibly Fred Hoiberg’s top mentor in the coaching world. Floyd’s UTEP team recently lost to Iowa by an 89-53 final. Yikes. But even so, one would think that Hoiberg and Floyd might have had a scouting type of conversation leading up to Friday’s game, right?
Wrong.
“He asked me if I had any questions about Iowa and I said, ‘No, I watched your game. I don’t want to talk to you,’” Hoiberg said. “They beat him by 100. He was a little hurt by it.”
To quote my generation’s favorite cable guy who happens to go by the name of Larry, “I don’t care who you are, that’s funny.”
