Indiana Women’s Basketball Suffers Setback in Loss at Minnesota.

Indiana women’s basketball was riding high heading to Minnesota Sunday, in the midst of a three game winning streak that featured some of the team’s best 3-point shooting of the season.

With at 10-point loss to a Gophers that also sits in the middle of the Big Ten standings, Teri Moren’s group seems to have lost their momentum.

The Hoosiers went cold from 3-point range, shooting just 7-22 from deep after going 15-28 in the big win against Rutgers. Sydney Parrish struggled in particular, hitting one of her six attempts coming off her season-high 22 point performance earlier in the week.

The loss brings Indiana to 7-5 in conference play and 15-8 overall. The five Big Ten losses this season match Indiana’s total number of Big Ten losses from 2022-2024.

Indiana’s inconsistency heading into the Minnesota game was arguably the team’s defining feature. The three-game winning streak that the Hoosiers brought to the Twin Cities came on the heels of a three-game losing streak that left Indiana at .500 (4-4) in conference play.

Moren did not shy away from this inconsistency in her postgame comments.

“Our experience should be able to help us. And with the inconsistency, I wish I could figure it out, and I wish I could help them and say all the right things to them. But we’re going to keep doing what we’re doing, and that’s grinding it out with them and trying to help them,” she said.

Compared to prior seasons, when Indiana dominated from start to finish, this group has had to grind from the second game of the season, when the Hoosiers were upset at home by Harvard. The Hoosiers followed that with one of their worst performances of the season in a road loss to Butler that left many fans panicking.

The two losses spurred a three game win streak that featured some of the best basketball Indiana has played this season, per Bart Torvik’s game scores. And then came another egg – a 69-39 neutral site loss to North Carolina.

Thus began a pattern of up and down play that Indiana is still struggling to snap out of as the calendar moves to mid February.

Moren and Indiana have six games left to find some consistency before the Big Ten Tournament, but the road won’t be easy. Torvik has Indiana favored in just two of its remaining games and projects the Hoosiers to drop a home game to Maryland.