Desperate times call for desperate measures, and for Indiana, desperation came in the form of a zone defense that changed everything on Tuesday night against No. 11 Michigan State in East Lansing.
At the 11:46 mark of the first half, coming out of the under-12 media timeout, Indiana unveiled a zone defense that flipped the script. The Hoosiers set up in a 2-2-1 full-court press—more of a token press than anything—but once Michigan State crossed half court, Indiana settled into a 2-3 zone.
From that moment on, the game belonged to the Hoosiers.
“The zone helped us,” Indiana head coach Mike Woodson said postgame. “That was the key factor in us winning this ballgame.”
The Hoosiers entered the Breslin Center on Tuesday night riding a five-game losing streak, staring down a Spartan team that thought it would be their big night.
With a win, Michigan State head coach Tom Izzo would have passed Bob Knight for the most all-time Big Ten wins. Instead, Woodson, one of Knight’s most well-known protégés, pulled out a defense the legendary coach famously despised, keeping Izzo tied with his mentor for at least one more game.
After falling behind 20-8 in the first eight minutes—continuing a troubling trend of early deficits—Woodson’s Hoosiers switched to a 2-3 zone out of the under-12 timeout. That adjustment transformed Indiana from a team staring down another blowout loss to a team in control of the game.
Michigan State, which had been rolling early, managed just 11 points for the rest of the half. By the time the final buzzer sounded, Indiana had erased the early double-digit hole, outscoring the Spartans 63-47 over the final 31 minutes to secure a 71-67 upset win.
The strategy made sense for Indiana. Michigan State entered the night as the worst 3-point shooting team in the Big Ten, hitting just 29.3% from deep—ranking 348th nationally. The Spartans thrive in transition, and Woodson knew the zone could stymie their up-tempo attack.
“We just felt like the only way to slow them down was to play some zone,” Woodson said. “The zone was effective... [we] played the hell out of it.”
For a team that had played itself out of NCAA Tournament conversations over the last month, Indiana’s season suddenly has life again.
A third Quad 1 win, coming in one of the toughest road environments in college basketball, has put the Hoosiers back on the tournament radar with six games to go. It was a win forged in resilience—a testament to a team with nothing left to lose.
Izzo admitted postgame that Indiana’s zone played a big role in disrupting Michigan State on the offensive end of the floor.
“When you run into [the zone], shooters have to make shots,” Izzo said. “Guys that have made shots didn’t make shots... I’ll give [Indiana] some credit, they played it pretty well.”
This wasn’t the first time Indiana had found success with the zone. Just three days earlier, the Hoosiers used it in the second half to erase a 16-point deficit against Michigan before letting the game slip away late. While playing zone throughout the second half, the Hoosiers held the Wolverines to 0-for-9 from beyond the arc over the final 20 minutes of the game.
That success in the zone, although it didn’t result in a win, gave Woodson and his staff the confidence to deploy it early against Michigan State.
"We worked on it the last few days, and it paid off for us tonight," Woodson said. "I thought tonight, we did a helluva job running it."
Behind the group decision to turn to the zone was a bit of irony and a whole lot of history. Woodson, a Knight disciple, spent years immersed in his coach’s staunch man-to-man principles. Yet it was a zone defense—something Knight had long resisted—that kept Izzo from passing the legendary Indiana head coach in the Big Ten record books.
Woodson even joked about it postgame, recalling a running joke he has with his longtime consultant, Jim Todd. The two have joked about playing zone for years, dating back to Woodson's time as the head coach of the Atlanta Hawks, when Todd convinced him to run a 2-3 zone down 3-2 in a best of seven series in the first round of the 2010 playoffs against Milwaukee.
Woodson and the Hawks, behind that zone defense, went on to win both game six and game seven to win the series. It was a similar shift in defensive philosophy that sparked Indiana's comeback against Michigan State on Tuesday night.
With the season hanging in the balance, Indiana needed something—anything—to turn its fortunes around. It turned out all it took was a little bit of zone.
A zone that, at least for a little while longer, has kept Indiana’s postseason hopes alive.
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