Iowa basketball players found it difficult to stomach Wednesday’s 68-65 loss at Ohio State.

They downplayed talk about the the 19-point turnaround they mustered after falling behind by 15 early in the first Big Ten game of the season. Instead, they talked about the need for quicker starts. Slow starts have become a trend in recent games for the Hawkeyes and they would prefer to find a solution sooner rather than later.

“We have to be aggressive from the start,” guard Jeff Peterson said. “The older guys, we need to set the tone and get us going. That’s part of our job.  We’ve seen too many times what can happen when you don’t start well.”

Freshman Matt Gatens said Iowa needs to simply come out and play.

“We were too tentative right away in this game,” he said. “You can’t do that. You have to compete. We shouldn’t be getting down 15 points to anybody.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 at 7:10 pm and is filed under Hawkeyes Basketball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.