Indiana women’s basketball ready for Oklahoma in up-tempo Round of 32 matchup as similar styles of play clash

Indiana women’s basketball comes into Monday’s matchup with 5-seed Oklahoma looking to get back to the Sweet 16 for the third time in four years.

But, in order to do that it needs to get through back-to-back Big 12 regular season champs. Oklahoma comes in at 23-9 overall and a hard-fought 73-70 win over Florida Gulf Coast in the first round of the NCAA Tournament on Saturday.

The Sooners were part of the Fort Myers tip-off earlier in the season, going 0-2 against Princeton and Tennessee — the two teams that Indiana defeated.

After a shaky 6-5 start, Oklahoma is 17-4 in the last 21 games, including a season-sweet of one-seeded Texas.

Indiana, coming off of a win over Fairfield in the first round, enters Thursday with a few keys in order to advance. It starts with pace and Indiana’s ability to defend.

“Just watching them on film and realizing that 60 percent of their scoring comes in the first ten seconds of their shot clock,” Indiana women’s basketball head coach Teri Moren said. “Talk about pace. We anticipate it being a faster pace tomorrow that they’ll want to play at. What we can’t do is can’t become a track meet for us. If we come down, we miss a shot, we go back down, and don’t want to trade misses with them. We want to understand what a good shot looks like for us.”

Oklahoma ranks ninth in the country in overall field goal attempts per game. They also ranks 24th in points per game (76.7). So, making sure Indiana gets back in transition is of the most importance heading into Monday night.

“Yeah, 60 percent of their shots come within the first ten seconds of their transition,” Chloe Moore-McNeil emphasized. “We know we have to get back, whether to make or a miss, and lock in on our transition D.”

Oklahoma is 14-1 when scoring at least 75 points this season. It is 19-4 when scoring 70 points. But, under 70 is where the Sooners struggle. They are just 4-6 in those 10 contests and Indiana has allowed just eight opponents to reach 70 points this season.

Similarly, Indiana’s magic number is 70 points offensively as well. The Hoosiers are 22-0 this year when hitting that mark, and just 3-5 under 70 points.

Because of Oklahoma’s potent scoring ability, most of its offense comes in transition or off of the secondary break, before the defense gets fully set up. There’s much more motion and free movement offensively, making it more difficult to pick up on key tendencies and play calls.

“Yeah, just the motion. You know, not a traditional set oriented offense. Read, react. I think that there is probably called plays inside of their motion that they’re trying to pick on whether it’s a matchup they like, whether they want to get a post touch,” Moren said of Oklahoma’s offense. “But it’s been hard to pick up play calls, you know, and that’s how you know that what they run is — there is some freedom inside of that.

“But I do think there is specific people that she wants to get a touch from. That’s what’s been hard to figure out, what that call is from the sideline. I think we have in watching all film we watched and even watching them live yesterday maybe picked up on two play calls and that makes it hard. It makes it hard when we go into preparation to say this is the call for this action.”

The Sooners are built between two versatile forwards who can pass and play both on the perimeter and in the paint. They are also streaky shooters. Skylar Vann averages 15.0 points, 6.9 rebounds and 2.4 assists per game. She shoots just 29.1 percent from three but attempts four per game. She has hit at least one three in 23 games this season.

Sahara Williams is the other forward, averaging 10.3 points, 5.4 rebounds and 1.5 assists per game. She’s shooting just 20.3 percent on 2.2 three point attempts per game.

In the backcourt is Payton Verhulst, averaging 12.8 points, 5.8 rebounds and 4.0 assists per game. She also shoots 35.9 percent from three.

“Yeah, they have two tremendous post players who can also play on the outside,” Indiana wing Sydney Parrish said. “So we have to have high hands for their shooters and make a presence on the inside.”

“I think they’re a well balanced team,” Moren added. “Have great guard play. Also really good post players that are going to play with their back to the basket, more traditional post players than what we saw with Fairfield. Something we’ll be used to just from our experience if Big 10 play, happened to play against traditional bigs. But really, really good team and great offense. A lot of body movement, a lot of ball movement.”

Indiana isn’t going to slow down the tempo, though. They are going to go right at Oklahoma just the way they have against opponents all year.

“We want to play past fast,” Moren said after IU’s first round win. ” … we weren’t trying to slow it down. That’s who we’ve been, a team that wants to play with freedom but also play with pace.”

The final key for Indiana women’s basketball is rebound. Oklahoma ranks 11th in the nation in rebounds per game (43.3) and grab 13.9 offensive rebounds a game. Indiana has given up more than 13 just one this season — 14 against Stanford. In total, only six opponents have finished with at least 10 offensive rebounds. Oklahoma has 24 games with at least 10 offensive rebounds.

But, at the end of the day — Indiana women’s basketball will be ready.

“I will say this: Going into the weekend we felt like the three opponents that — we knew we were obviously going to play Fairfield — but the other two, I think Fairfield helped us kind of get ready for either one of the teams, whether it was going to be Florida Gulf Coast and/or Oklahoma in terms of their motion offense and them playing five out and all the cutting that we’re going to have to guard.

“I thought the preparation for Fairfield probably put us ahead of our preparation today for Oklahoma because we’ve been repping a lot of that last week.”

SEE ALSO: Indiana women’s basketball ‘playing with a chip on our shoulder’ against Oklahoma as it looks to avenge last year’s NCAA Tournament stunner: ‘We’re entitled to nothing’

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