Despite Cody Zeller’s worst offensive performance of his college career, in which he failed to cash in a single field goal and had a total of two points, the Hoosiers instead relied on suffocating team defense in a dominating 72-49 victory over Penn State at Assembly Hall on Wednesday night.

The Nittany Lions only scored on 17 of their 51 field goal attempts (33.3%), and Indiana held their opponent to the second lowest point total recorded this season (Sam Houston State scored 45 back on Nov. 15) en route to their fifth conference win.

Victor Oladipo was a monster both on the court and in the box score, recording a total of 19 points, 6 rebounds, 5 assists, and 3 steals in 34 minutes of play.

Second to Oladipo was Yogi Ferrell, who hit 6 of 7 field goals, including 3 of 4 from downtown, totaling 15 points and setting a new career high.

Christian Watford continued his improved and consistent play, notching his ninth straight double digit game with 10 points. He was just one rebound shy of a double-double.

Our bench actually saw a fair amount of minutes — all five bench players had at least nine minutes of playing time or more, and we even saw Maurice Creek for the first time since Butler, but his contributions were limited.

In fact, Will Sheehey was the only bench player to hit any field goals, but it was nice to see him back to form with 12 of the bench’s 18 total points.

Sheehey was even back to poking the side of his head with three fingers when he drained one from beyond the arc. He even had Yogi doing it too. What are they calling that, exactly? It looks absurd but I love it.

In our preview we looked at Indiana’s offensive and defensive efficiency, and while there seemed to be a consensus that the Hoosiers were on a little bit of a three game slide (vs Minnesota, Wisconsin, Northwestern), the cause was less clear. Statistically, the Hoosiers weren’t scoring as many points, but their average points per possession hadn’t suffered as much.

Rather, the Hoosiers had been consistently suffering from lapses in defense, conceding 1.18 points allowed per possession, up from their home average of .820 points per possession. Over a 62-possession game (also the average number of possessions for IU over their slide), that’s more than a 22 point difference in points allowed.

We concluded that if the Hoosiers were to return to form, they were going to have to do it defensively, and that’s exactly what they did:

DEFENSIVE EFFICIENCY COMPARISON:

Points allowed per possession SEASON AVG. (home) .820 SEASON AVG. (away) .960 DURING 3-GAME ‘SLIDE’ 1.18 v PENN STATE (Jan 23) .736

As we can see, the Hoosiers showed a marked improvement on the defensive end, and a sharp turnaround from the three previous games. It was a refreshing performance, but one that was expected, given our opponent.

Sunday means a visit against the 13th ranked Michigan State Spartans, and a must-win if they want to remain atop the Big Ten.