Michigan is by far the most enigmatic team in the Big Ten.
So it was only fitting that it was part of this game Saturday, which was as bizarre as Alice’s trip through the looking glass.
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Not even a highly imaginative novelist armed with a thesaurus could do Indiana’s 76-61 victory justice.
For instance, the Wolverines made 29 of 35 free throws. The host Hoosiers, the Big Ten’s best free-throw shooting team in conference play at 80.2 percent, made only 10 of 18.
“We’re an aggressive team, so we’re going to commit more fouls,” Indiana coach Kelvin Sampson explained with surprising calm. “Some of our fouls were from us not being very smart. But some of our fouls were from us being very aggressive. What’s a coach to say?”
For his part, Michigan coach Tommy Amaker was surprised.
“You like to think if you do [what we did] on the road . . . ” Amaker said. “If someone had told me that before the game, I would have thought it would have been a lot closer or maybe we would win.”
They didn’t, in large part because his Wolverines, the Big Ten’s best three-point-shooting team in conference play at 42 percent, made only 2 of 9 threes for 22.2 percent.
“Our defense was really, really solid all day long,” Sampson said in attempting to explain that statistic.
The No. 23 Hoosiers, also accomplished from beyond the arc, did immeasurably better, making 10 of the 20 they took.
There was also a ready explanation for what happened down low, where the far smaller Hoosiers grabbed seven more rebounds than the long and active Wolverines.
“We thought if we were physical with them, stayed into their bodies, we’d take some of their length away,” Hoosiers forward Lance Stemler said.
OK, but there was so much else that occurred that defies such an easy explanation.
Take the work of Hoosiers forward D.J. White, who is listed generously at 6 feet 9 inches. He spent much of the day matched against the Wolverines’ 6-11 Courtney Sims but finished with 15 points and seven rebounds while bedeviling his taller foe with baby hook shots and feathery jumpers.
He again exposed Sims (11 points, seven at the line) as a little man in a big man’s body, just as their own play at the start of the game and the start of the second half exposed the Wolverines as an experienced team that has learned very little. They knew Indiana (15-5, 5-2), coming off its loss Tuesday at Illinois, would be fired up. They knew it would be jacked by its home crowd and want to show it was better than it had played in Champaign.
They knew that and, with a starting lineup of four seniors and a junior, they should have been steeled and prepared to throw some heavy leather of their own. They weren’t.
They instead showed up with their hands down and were simply peppered by the Hoosiers, who hit them with a three by Roderick Wilmont and a baby jumper by White and a pair of threes by Stemler in the opening 104 seconds.
The Wolverines (16-6, 4-3) did not get a field goal until nearly four minutes were gone. They did not get their first field goal out of their set offense until more than five minutes were gone, and they still had only three field goals after 15 minutes. They were surviving only at the line, their personal life-support system, but then came the start of the second half, which began with Indiana up a modest nine.
Again, this was a moment a veteran team should recognize as important and respond to with urgency. But the Wolverines went more than five minutes without a field goal, and the Hoosiers, aggressive always, knocked them out with a 14-3 run that built their lead to 20.
“When you put yourself in a hole like that, there’s no margin of error,” Amaker said, saying it all.
“After that, everything has to go like clockwork for us and not so well for them. But it usually doesn’t go that way in this crazy game.”
This crazy game, indeed.
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