By Pat Harty

IOWA CITY, Iowa – The Iowa men’s basketball team continued its resurgence in the Big Ten on Saturday, but an unfortunate trend also continued to plague the team.

Iowa defeated Ohio State 72-62 at Carver-Hawkeye Arena for its third victory in a row, but now the attention shifts to junior forward Tyler Cook.

Iowa’s leading scorer and rebounder was helped off the court in obvious pain with 4 minutes and 8 seconds left to play and with Iowa leading 63-48. The 6-foot-9 Cook suffered what appeared to be an ankle injury and did not return.

Cook also missed Iowa’s previous game at Northwestern this past Wednesday with a sore knee.

Iowa coach Fran McCaffery had little to say about Cook's injury to the media after the game other then saying that Cook is sore.

Cook's health issues are the latest in a growing list of injuries that have hampered Iowa this season.

And yet, the team still has managed to turn its season around in what has been an incredible week for McCaffery and the Hawkeyes.

Actually, it has only taken six days for Iowa to change the course of its season by turning a 0-3 start in Big Ten play into a 3-3 resurgence since last Sunday.

Iowa improved to 3-3 in the Big Ten and 14-3 overall with Saturday's victory, and will hit the road again for a game at Penn State on Wednesday. Ohio State fell to 3-3 and 12-4 and has lost three games in a row.

What has happened to Iowa and to Ohio State over the past week shows how quickly a team’s position can change for better or worse.

The Iowa players were frustrated after starting 0-3 in the Big Ten, and fans were starting to worry or assume that a repeat of last season was about to happen when Iowa finished 4-14 in the Big Ten and 14-19 overall.

But the current team has shown that it’s different than last year’s team.

Iowa already has matched last season’s win total at 14 with 14 conference games still remaining.

That doesn’t happen by accident.

The players instead of succumbing to adversity have found a way to overcome it.

They committed to playing better on defense after having performed woefully last season, and it's clear that progress has been made. Iowa has now held back-to-back Big Ten opponents to 63 and 62 points after allowing nearly 80 points per game last season.

McCaffery no longer has the luxury of using a 10 or 11-man rotation, but sometimes less is better.

He now mostly uses a nine-man rotation and each of those nine players seems to understand his role, from Cook as the go-to presence down low on offense to Maishe Dailey providing depth in the backcourt.

Nine was certainly enough to defeat the Buckeyes on Saturday.

Neither team had much success on offense in the first half, which included 12 lead changes and was played at a pace reminiscent of the Todd Lickliter days at Iowa.

Ohio State made a 3-point basket in the closing seconds of the first half and led 26-24 at the break.

The teams combined for 20 baskets and 20 turnovers in the first half, so maybe the best thing about the first half is that it finally ended.

It was hard to tell if it was more a case of really good defense or really bad offense, or a little both in the first half.

Ohio State was obviously hampered by Kaleb Wesson’s foul problems in the first half because the 6-foot-9, 270-poud center spent a long stretch on the bench and then had little impact after returning late in the first half.

Whatever the case, both teams regrouped at halftime and the second half saw the pace increase significantly.

Iowa seized the momentum early with a 9-0 scoring run that included seven consecutive points from Luka Garza and a rim-rattling left-handed dunk by Cook that expanded the lead to 37-30

Iowa would never trail again.

One sidenote to Saturday's victory besides Cook's injury is that junior point guard Jordan Bohannon joined the 1,000-point club at Iowa. He also joined two of his older brothers as 1,000-point scorers at the Division I level.

His brother Matt Bohannon scored 1,092 points for Northern Iowa while Jason Bohannon scored 1,170 points for Wisconsin. 

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