The Minnesota Golden Gophers were able to set aside a horrid stretch of play midway through the second half and fend off a Peter Jok-led Iowa Hawkeye team in double overtime for a 101-89 victory at Williams Arena on Wednesday night.
The story of the game was one that is somewhat familiar to Gopher fans as they saw the home team jump out to a sizable 14-point lead, only to see it squandered away with some head-scratching decision-making and poor shot selection for a seven-minute span during the middle of the second half. The Fran McCaffrey installed press that the Gophers seemed perfectly able to break in the first and early portion of the second half all of a sudden became a suffocating Venus Fly trap of a defense with the likes of Dupree McBrayer, Akeem Springs, and Amir Coffey being the poor unsuspecting insects in this poorly composed metaphor.