By Hawk Fanatic

The Iowa men’s basketball team moved a step closer to not making the Big Ten Tournament with Tuesday’s 81-61 loss at Illinois.

Iowa fell to 6-11 in Big Ten play and is trying to avoid finishing below 15th place in the conference standings because only the top 15 teams will qualify for the Big Ten Tournament.

With 11 conferences losses, Iowa will finish with a losing record in Big Ten play for the first time since the 2017-18 season.

There were 10 Big Ten teams with four to seven wins in conference play heading into Tuesday’s games, so a lot will happen between now and the end of the regular season.

Iowa’s next game is Friday at Northwestern, which despite being without two starters due to injuries, has won two straight games against Ohio State and Minnesota by scores of 70-49 and 75-63, respectively.

Both games were also on the road.

Iowa will then face Big Ten leader Michigan State on March 6 in Iowa City before closing the regular season against Nebraska on March 9 in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Iowa will likely be an underdog in each of its final three regular-season games, so Fran McCaffery’s squad faces a steep uphill climb just to make the conference tournament.

Illinois, which had lost three straight games, bolted to a 24-11 lead, but then Iowa answered with an 11-0 scoring run, cutting the deficit to 24-22 with slightly less than seven minutes left in the first half.

Iowa trailed 37-30 at halftime, but Iowa had withstood Illinois’ early run, cutting six points off the 13-point deficit.

Illinois then started the second half on a 19-8 scoring run and Iowa never really threatened again while falling to 15-13 overall.

Iowa played without starting point guard Drew Thelwell, who continues to struggle with an ankle injury, and without sophomore forward Owen Freeman, the team’s leading scorer and rebounder, who is out for the season after having surgery on a finger on his right shooting hand.

Sophomore point guard Brock Harding, who is from Moline, Illinois, led Iowa in scoring with 16 points, while senior forward Payton Sandfort was held to just seven points on 2-of-10 shooting from the field.

Junior guard Josh Dix was the only other Hawkeye to score in double figures with 11 points.

Iowa only made 6-of-18 shots from 3-point range and had 16 turnovers.

The Hawkeyes struggled early in both halves and that would be too much to overcome.

“It’s something we talk about at practice and talk about in the locker room about, hey, this is where we really have got to change some things,” Harding said of starting slowly on the Learfield post-game radio interview. “We can’t get down early and expect to be able to come back every single time. We’ve got to start quick and start fast and we just haven’t been great at that down the stretch.

Iowa won the rebounding battle 36-31 against one of the top rebounding teams in the Big Ten, and yet still lost by 20 points.

Iowa has lost now nine of its last 12 games.

“You go on the road and your out-rebound the second leading rebounding team in the country and you think it’s going to be a little different,” Iowa head coach Fran McCaffery said on the Learfield post-game interview. “Very uncharacteristic game for us from a turnover standpoint. We started the game poorly and that’s why we got behind early.

“We’re a team that doesn’t the ball over 16 times, and they weren’t pressing or anything like that. We just made some bad choices and dug ourselves a hole there.”