On Selection Sunday, it was announced that Iowa is the No. 7 seed in the South Region and will play 10th-seeded Temple Friday in Brooklyn.
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Jaylen Bond said he played video games and ate, among other things, to keep his mind clear. “It’s March now and it’s win or go home so we need to stay positive and regroup”, Jok told the media. They then gathered with family and friends in a Carver-Hawkeye Arena conference room to watch the selection show. They will play their first-round game against Iowa on Thursday in Denver. However, Temple is not a particularly good shooting team – their effective field goal rate is just 47 percent – and they lack Iowa’s interior size.
Most of the Iowa players admit they know nothing about Temple (21-11), which lost to CT 77-62 on Saturday in the semifinals of the American Athletic Conference tournament.
Iowa, Iowa State, Northern Iowa and Wisconsin learned their NCAA men’s college basketball tournament opponents today.
McCaffery is from Philadelphia, where both Temple and Villanova are located, and he graduated from Penn, where Dunphy formerly coached.
The NCAA tournament begins with the First Four on Tuesday and Wednesday.
“I’ve seen them a number of times and I know they have good players”, Dunphy said of the Hawkeyes. Pay attention to what you’re supposed to do, and I didn’t think we paid as strict attention as we possibly could [against UConn]. “And we’ll be able to hopefully get a lot of Temple fans there”.
But the message echoing from the Liacouras Center was clear – the focus is steadily on Iowa and not what could go down next Sunday at the Barclays Center in the second round.
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But this time the stakes will be just a little bit higher. “Now we’re done with that and we can set our sights on Iowa”.
