No. 13 Indiana takes down No. 2 Ohio State

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Indiana is starting to make a habit of beating these highly ranked teams.

On Saturday, they didn't need a buzzer-beating shot to win, and they didn't even storm the court afterward.

Victor Oladipo scored the go-ahead basket on a fast-break layup with 36 seconds left Saturday and No. 13 Indiana upset No. 2 Ohio State 74-70, the first time Indiana has beaten the nation's top two teams in the same season.

"They've been punking us the past couple years and we realized that," Oladipo said after scoring 15 points. "This year we had to go toe-to-toe with them."

Instead of backing down, the Hoosiers (13-1, 1-1 Big Ten) added another chapter to the program's rapid re-emergence.

The 12-0 start is the fourth in school history and the Hoosiers' first since the 1975-76 team wound up as the last undefeated national champions.

The win over Kentucky on Dec. 10 was only the second time the Hoosiers had beaten a No. 1 team at Assembly Hall.

Now, Indiana becomes the ninth team since 1996-97 to beat both a No. 1 and a No. 2 in one season, and it joins Kansas in 2007-08 and Louisville in 2003-04 as the only teams over that span to achieve the feat in the same month.

But Saturday's celebration paled in comparison with the storm-the-court stampede following the Kentucky upset.

Part of the explanation was that the students were still on holiday break. The other reason: It wasn't as big a surprise.

"(The players) just kept giving us (coaches) confidence," coach Tom Crean said. "They came to every timeout, they were totally locked in and at the 7:38 mark, you could just see it in their eyes they were so locked in. They matched the Ohio State toughness and energy."

Jordan Hulls had 17 points to lead Indiana and Verdell Jones supplied 14. But the Hoosiers were far from perfect.

They shot 45.8 percent from the field, about 5 percentage points below their average. They got outrebounded 35-28 and missed the same number of free throws (seven) as Ohio State. Foul trouble limited freshman center Cody Zeller, the engineer of Indiana's turnaround, to 21 minutes, and he fouled out with 2:24 left.

But Indiana was still good enough.

"It came down to us not being able to get a stop," Ohio State guard Aaron Craft said. "Give them credit, they just kept coming back and coming back and knocking down big shot after big shot."

Craft led the Buckeyes (13-2, 1-1) with 16 points. Jared Sullinger had 15 points and nine rebounds, and William Buford finished with 12 points, but missed a go-ahead 3-point attempt with five seconds to play.

Ohio State, which spent most of the game in foul trouble, never really looked like itself.

Sullinger, Buford and Deshaun Thomas combined to play only 29 minutes in the first half after each picked up their second fouls. Buford picked up two more in the first 3:32 of the second half, and Thomas picked up his third with 17:21 left.

That forced coach Thad Matta to mix-and-match his rotations in hopes of keeping a five-game winning streak alive.

"It was obviously a difficult challenge," said Matta, who had won a school-record six straight over the Hoosiers. "I thought we put ourselves in a pretty decent position."