Sunday afternoon in Assembly Hall offered another familiar feeling for Indiana women’s basketball: the lights and glamour of a big game without the desired result.

For the second time this season, Indiana was close to taking down a top-five opponent on their home floor but came up short, falling 73-66 to No. 4 USC.

Indiana faced the task of defending some of the best players in the country. Although the Hoosiers did well at times, the talents of JuJu Watkins and the other Trojans proved too much to overcome.

Lexus Bargesser and Chloe Moore-McNeil were assigned to defend Watkins and did well in the first quarter. They pressed her hard, face-guarding her while forcing everything to the left side. Any time Watkins caught the ball, multiple bodies came flooding her way. Watkins scored just one point in the first quarter.

However, as the game went on and USC adjusted, the offense flowed easier for the rest of the day. Watkins and the Trojans found their groove, doing most of their damage in transition.

One of the game’s biggest plays came in the final seconds of the third quarter. Indiana was about to take a two-point lead into the final ten minutes when Watkins, with five seconds remaining, took the ball from one end of the floor to the other, put up a left-wing three, and gave USC a one-point lead right at the buzzer. This momentum swing came in one of the game’s most important moments. Watkins led all scorers at the end of the day with 22 points, including six rebounds.

A lack of shot-making proved to be the undoing of an Indiana win. The Hoosiers and Trojans finished with similar results from the field, 37.5 percent and 39 percent, respectively, but the difference came from three and the free throw line. The Hoosiers shot 27.6 percent from deep, with multiple open looks from the outside failing to connect. And from the line, USC shot 21-for-24.

“When you look at how they scored, it doesn’t seem that overwhelming,” Teri Moren said postgame. “Then you look at the free throws, and that’s the game right there.”

Indiana had opportunities to climb back into the game, but the missed shots deflated Assembly Hall any time the ball didn’t go through the basket.

“I feel like at times we were getting great looks, and then I think at times we went away from what got us those great looks,” Moore-McNeil said. “I think that was really important, especially when you’re playing a great team like USC; you can’t have that kind of slippage.”

Turnovers were also costly for the Hoosiers. Indiana committed 15, which resulted in an extra 17 points for the Trojans.

At the start of the third quarter, Chloe Moore-McNeil made a pair of turnovers that Moren stated “took the wind out of us.” They happened a minute apart with nine minutes on the clock. Indiana inbounded the ball twice, and in a matter of seconds, a broken-up reversal and a failed entry pass led to USC running the floor both times. That type of mistake piled up and held the Hoosiers back.

Despite three Hoosiers in double figures and a double-double from Sydney Parrish, Indiana’s missed opportunities offensively caused the result.

Another intense battle with a top-ranked opponent proved this Indiana squad has the talent to compete with the best. They’ve shown they can play some of their best basketball in the most intense matchups, but the issues lie in the games outside of the marquee opponents. They weren’t at their best against Harvard, Butler, or even three days ago against Illinois.

“I think we were trending in a really good direction after we got back from, you know, early on and going to Iowa, winning at Iowa was hard,” Moren said. “Then we came back; we certainly took a step back, I thought, the other night against a really good Illinois team that came in and shot it well inside the hall.

“But again, I’ll go back to it; all of them are so important. This is such a great league. And we can’t have a different mindset, right? Against UCLA and against USC, the mindset and strategy of being engaged in what we’re trying to do night in and night out. It has to be the same, no matter what the opponent is.”

Right now, Indiana is in a solid position to earn another NCAA tournament bid. But to stay there, the Hoosiers must show the same intent in every game.

“Our room for error is very small,” Moren explained. “And we got to be so good on so many levels, whether it’s coverages, whether it’s our actions that we’re running offensively and their screening actions and there are things that are happening inside the actions that we can’t forget to do, executing all of it. So we got to just keep our head down and keep grinding and realize that it’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint.”

(Photo credit: IU Athletics)

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