Missouri Valley Conference Basketball

Bradley vs Northern Iowa Basketball Recap

Bradley 68, Northern Iowa 59

The Bradley Braves won't make the NCAA Tournament as an at-large team, but they can make the NIT if they produce enough of a late-season push. That effort got off to a good start on Saturday afternoon in Peoria, Ill.

The joy discovered by the home team at Carver Arena stood in stark contrast to the mood inside a losing visitors' locker room. For the Northern Iowa Panthers, the prospect of an at-large berth in the field of 65 is suddenly not so certain, making the remainder of this season ever more critical for the Sons of Cedar Falls, Iowa.

First, just how did coach Ben Jacobsen's squad lose its second Missouri Valley conference game in 15 tries? In a word, impotence. UNI defends with passion and expertise, but the Panthers struggle to score, and have won only because they're so solid at the defensive end. This battle with Bradley was lost because the well simply ran dry and stayed that way in a punchless second half.

UNI took a 32-23 lead to the intermission, but the Panthers just didn't bring their shooting shoes to the second 20 minutes of play. Northern Iowa hit just five field goal attempts after halftime and naturally experienced prolonged scoring droughts. The first one occupied the opening five and a half minutes of the second half, and the second one consumed three minutes and 35 seconds later in the second stanza. Coach Jim Les's Bradley bunch used these two spells of poor Panther offense to carve out a 52-46 lead with 5:12 remaining. Six points might not be much for the higher-octane teams in the United States, but for Northern Iowa - and, for that matter, most of a defense-dominated Missouri Valley Conference - a six-point spread with five minutes left means a great deal. UNI couldn't catch fire late, and the Braves maintained a lead of at least five points straight through to the finish.

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Now, what to make of the Panthers' NCAA hopes? Yes, they're still 22-3 and 13-2 in the league, but Ben Jacobsen's team owns only two wins over the RPI top 50 ( Siena and Wichita State). The 22 wins are nice, but only seven of them are against the RPI top 100. And then there's that nasty loss to a horrible DePaul club early in the season. It's true that 13-2 in the Valley is excellent, and in all candor, UNI still looks like a team with a resume that can snag an at-large bid. However, this loss to Bradley reduces UNI's margin for error. Precisely because the Valley is so bunched in the middle, it's hard for the Panthers to rack up what anyone would call a "quality win." The task in front of Northern Iowa is to avoid losses (not in terms of the team's on-court mentality, mind you, but in terms of what it needs to achieve to get to the field of 65).

A reasonable approach would suggest that UNI can still get an at-large bid if it wins its remaining Valley games. Two of those contests are at home, and the third one is at league doormat Evansville. If the Panthers take care of business on those occasions and also bump off Old Dominion in a very important BracketBusters game on Feb. 19, this team shouldn't need to win the MVC Tournament in order to punch its tourney ticket. But if UNI loses to ODU or slips once more in the Valley over the next two weeks, it's going to be hard to put too much stock in a limited body of achievement.

Yes, Northern Iowa is still in good shape for the Big Dance. Today's loss at Bradley, though, makes the near future just a bit more tense for the leader of the Missouri Valley.

By: Matt Zemek
DFN Sports Staff Writer