Thought we played fine the first half. OSU adjusted to sell out on Ayo and we missed some open looks in crunch time.
So my first though was: they probably out-shot us, we missed too many looks. But our FG% was actually quite a bit higher — we made 24 of 55 (6 treys) they made 22 of 57 (3 treys). That puts us up 7. So where’d they find their other 15 points?
24 makes on 28 free throws to our 9 on 10. They shot 1 free throw for every 2 field goal attempts they took — that’s our worst performance of the year in terms of opponent’s Free Throw Rate (FTA/FGA) at 49%. The next highest was 43% at Wisconsin (actually, our worst 7 are all on the road).
So that’s where the points came from. The other question is — why did they have so many opportunities to get to the line? If you count 2 FTs as a possession (or a bit less for and-1s), they had 70 offensive possessions to our 60. Where’d those extra 10 come from?
As others have pointed out, rebounding was the killer in this regard. OSU grabbed 16 of 38 misses, or 42% — also a season worst for our D. We grabbed 9. So there’s 7 of the 10 extra chances. The other three came from 14 turnovers to our 11 — one of our highest turnover rates in 2020 but not as noteworthy as the rebounding.
Obviously in the run of play you can’t just slice and dice like this, but IMO the statistical story tonight is still informative:
- We gave OSU 10 extra chances to score
- Those 10 extra chances turned into 15 extra made FTs
- Those 15 extra points more than made up for our being 7 points more efficient otherwise.
Oh well. Good opportunity for BU and the guys to scheme against defenses selling out to stop Ayo. And on to some sweet sweet revenge over Iowa!