COLUMBUS, Ohio — Indiana basketball coach Mike Woodson had little patience for a question about the “noise” surrounding the program after Friday night’s 77-76 win over Ohio State.
The speculation over Woodson’s future reached a fever pitch after the Hoosiers (14-5; 5-3 Big Ten) lost back-to-back 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 “hang in there” with the team after the 94-69 loss to the Illini, but had a more defiant tone on Friday night when he cut off a reporter attempting to ask a question about the topic of players dealing with that “outside noise.”
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“I don’t care about the outside noise,” Woodson said. “I really don’t.”
He reiterated the point once the full question was asked.
“Well again, it just shows you a little bit about the character our team,” Woodson said. “I ain’t going to comment on the outside noise, it’s ridiculous.”
Woodson said his players “fought their asses off” to pull out a comeback win over Ohio State despite being short-handed — Malik Reneau (knee) missed his fifth straight game and Bryson Tucker (finger) sat out — and multiple starters (Oumar Ballo and Luke Goode) playing the full second half and overtime.
“It was a total team effort,” Woodson said.
The coach also expressed frustration over the drastic nature of some of the criticism his team has received over the last week.
“We’re sitting here and we’ve won 14 games, man,” Woodson said. “It’s not like it’s 5-14. We’ve played some pretty good basketball and had some good stretches. We got our asses beat in those two games, ain’t nothing you can do about it now.”
Indiana’s players looked at the big picture as well following those disappointing recent losses.
“You look at other teams around the country in power conferences, there are some teams under .500,” Indiana forward Luke Goode said. “We took a step back, we got a reality check, but we got to bounce back from it.”
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 over IU’s lack of toughness and pride, but those complaints were nowhere to be found on Friday before the team boarded the plane home.
“One of the biggest trends of our losses this season is we get down two, three or four possessions and we essentially quit in a sense and then we end up being down 30 like that,” Goode said. “Tonight, we were down eight late in the first half, we came together and said let’s change the script.”
Michael Niziolek is the Indiana beat reporter for The Bloomington Herald-Times. You can follow him on X @michaelniziolek and read all his coverage by clicking here.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: IU basketball looks to ‘change the script’ on negativity surrounding program
