COLUMBUS, Ohio — Indiana basketball Coach Mike Woodson had little patience for a question about the “noise” surrounding the program following Friday night’s 77-76 win over Ohio State.
Speculation about Woodson’s future reached a fever pitch after the Hoosiers (14-5; 5-3 Big Ten) lost two straight conference games by 25 points and fans expressed their frustration at Assembly Hall. with “Fire Woodson” chants in the first half as they trailed Illinois by 30 points.
He asked fans to “stick it out” with the team after the 94-69 loss to the Illini, but he struck a more defiant tone Friday night when he interrupted a reporter who was trying to ask a question on the subject of players dealing with this “outside noise.”
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“I don’t care about the noise outside,” Woodson said. “Really not.”
He reiterated this point once the full question was asked.
“Well, again, that kind of shows you the character of our team,” Woodson said. “I’m not going to comment on the outside noise, it’s ridiculous.”
Woodson said his players “fought like crazy” to earn a win against Ohio State despite being shorthanded – Malik Reneau (knee) missed his fifth straight game and Bryson Tucker (finger) sat out – and several starters (Oumar Ballo and Luke Goode) playing the entire second half and overtime.
“It was a total team effort,” Woodson said.
The coach also expressed frustration with the drastic nature of some of the criticism his team has received over the past week.
“We’re sitting here and we’ve won 14 games, man,” Woodson said. “It’s not like it was 5-14. We played really good basketball and had some good streaks. We got our ass beat in those two games, there’s nothing you can do about it now. “
Indiana players also looked at the bigger picture after these recent disappointing losses.
“You look at other teams around the country in the power conferences, there are teams below .500,” Indiana forward Luke Goode said. “We took a step back, we faced reality, but we have to bounce back.”
Goode scored a career-high 23 points in the win over Ohio State and he hit the go-ahead 3-pointer with 1:07 left in overtime. He expressed frustration earlier in the week with IU’s lack of toughness and pride, but those complaints were nowhere to be found Friday before the team boarded the plane to return home.
“One of the biggest trends in our losses this season is we lose two, three or four possessions and we give up one way, and then we end up losing 30 like that,” Goode said. “Tonight we were down eight at the end of the first half, we came together and said: let’s change the scenario.”
Michael Niziolek is the Indiana reporter for the Bloomington Herald-Times. You can follow him on @michaelniziolek and read all of its coverage by clicking here.
This article was originally published in the Herald-Times: IU Basketball seeks to ‘change the script’ on negativity surrounding the program
