The Iowa Hawkeyes beat the Eastern Illinois Panthers tonight 71-62. Not a very inspired game by the Hawks. Now I’m not saying Eastern is a bad team or anything, but they are now 1-8 to Iowa’s 7-2; the Hawks shouldn’t have had to work that hard for a win. They seemed awfully sluggish and not mentally with it.
The Hawks were led in scoring by Greg Brunner with 16 (he also led the team with 9 rebounds and 5 assists); the other double-figures scorers were Jeff Horner (13), Jared Reiner (12), Pierre Pierce (10) and Brody Boyd (10). The Panthers were led by Jason Wright with 14 with Jesse Mackinson (13), Aaron Patterson (12) and Emanuel Dildy (11) rounding out the double-figures scoring. Brunner is proving to be quite the workhorse; he seems to be a tireless rebounder and battles on the boards and in the position wars fiercely. Glenn Worley continues to “improve” his health; he played 15 minutes and scored 7 points, but had 4 fouls.
For some reason unknown to sane people, Iowa coach Steve Alford held out Nick DeWitz and Mike Henderson because of what he termed “academic reasons”. Both players are eligible but neither met the “men’s basketball academic team standards”, whatever that is. Not that these two would have sparked the team much more than anyone else would have, but what the heck is Alford doing? Both met university standards for eligibility. Because of the “Ronnie Harmon” incidents in Iowa’s past, the athletic teams at Iowa have a higher eligibility requirements than nearly all other Big 10 schools (I believe the lone exception to this is Northwestern). Sounds to me like he’s saying “They are in my doghouse and academics is what I will call it.”
The Hawks travel to play Missouri on Saturday; hopefully they won’t get beaten too badly there, but Missouri is a very strong team. After that they start of the Big 10 season. Iowa still has a long way to go to be a winning team in the Big 10, even though the conference is not nearly as strong as it has been in the past few years. Lets hope they get their cumulative act together.
