IOWA CITY, Iowa – Jamison Battle went to Ohio State to make the NCAA Tournament in his final year of college basketball. With his veteran presence and perimeter shooting ability, the Minnesota transfer felt the Buckeyes and coach Chris Holtmann would give him the opportunity to experience March Madness in his fifth year.

Friday night inside Carver-Hawkeye Arena, Battle finished with a team-high 17 points, but it wasn’t enough to power the Buckeyes past Iowa. In a 79-77 loss to the Hawkeyes, Ohio State fell to 13-9 overall and 3-8 in the Big Ten with any hopes of reaching the NCAA Tournament dimming with each loss.

The loss was Ohio State’s fourth straight and seventh in its past eight games, but with home games against Indiana and Maryland on tap Battle was anything but defeated after this loss.

“We showed what we can do today, especially when we play in different stretches, but those stretches have to be longer,” he said. “That belief, it has to circulate around our locker room and I think it is but it’s got to be more. I think today showed it.

“For us to win, it’s there. We’ve shown it earlier this year. It’s just about how bad we want it, and we want it bad after tonight.”

Ohio State’s past two road games were double-digit losses that were largely noncompetitive during the second half. The Buckeyes led Iowa 38-36 at the half, held a 54-51 lead with 11 minutes to play and had the ball with a chance to go ahead in the final 30 seconds. Ohio State’s adjusted defensive efficiency rating of 122.1 points per 100 possessions, while still not great, was its best mark since it beat Penn State on Jan. 20 for its last win.

Offensively, the Buckeyes had an adjusted offensive efficiency rating of 119.0 points per 100 possessions, their best mark in Big Ten play this year.

"This has now been two really highly efficient offensive games where we’ve really performed well and played pretty smart basketball and played through the paint and played inside-out," coach Chris Holtmann said. "We’ve done some good things. We had a good defensive first half. We have to be able to sustain an effort longer. We have to be able to take a team’s strengths away at a higher level."

It still wasn’t enough to head home to Columbus with a win, though, and that’s ultimately what matters. The way Ohio State fought, though, gives Battle reason to believe things are going to improve even as March grows closer.

“There’s still time,” he said. “There’s still time for the tables to turn. I think we have more than enough in this locker room and I think there’s belief in this locker room that we can do it.”

They have nine more games to prove it.

Sophomore forward Evan Mahaffey, who had 6 points, five rebounds and four assists with no turnovers, said the Buckeyes are keeping that perspective “by not looking into it too much. Especially with social media, you can get fed up into everything saying, ‘Oh, you ain’t got much time, you’ve got to win this game, and if you don’t …’

“I think we’ve got a close-knit group of guys that’s able to push out the outside noise and say we’re worried about the next day.”

As the pressure grows and the calendar inches closer to the end of the regular season, Holtmann said his team’s effort against the Hawkeyes shows they haven’t given up on the season but that he’s “anxious” to see how the Buckeyes return to practice Sunday after having Saturday off.

“We’ve got no chance if we don’t compete at the level that we have to compete at, and our guys competed tonight," Holtmann said. "They didn’t feel the end result of the reward of a win, so that means we’ve got to compete longer and harder and for longer stretches, but it doesn’t mean that we dismiss what we did today for stretches of the game that put us in position to win the game.”

Here are three more takeaways from Friday night’s loss.

What did Ohio State call trailing by a point in the final minute?

It wasn’t the play that caused the Buckeyes to lose, but it certainly went down as the last real gasp for the visitors on Friday night.

Trailing 74-71, Felix Okpara slammed the ball over Owen Freeman with 1:04 to play and pulled the Buckeyes within one point. It put them in a familiar spot, needing a stop and a score to potentially flip the script on a game.

Ohio State got half of that. Perennial Buckeye nemesis Tony Perkins missed a jumper, and when Roddy Gayle Jr. secured the rebound and was tied up for a jump ball, Ohio State was awarded possession with 38.6 seconds left and a chance to pull ahead of the Hawkeyes. It was a situation Holtmann said they had planned for, but it ended with a turnover, not a shot. Gayle was officially credited with a double dribble, although it was Okpara who committed the turnover as he dribbled the ball, hesitated and dribbled again to draw the whistle.

“(It was) a simple end-of-game play that we had run over and over,” Holtmann said. “It’s a last-four-minutes action for us. We were trying to get Roddy in a ball screen situation. We had the matchup we wanted. Not that the kid can’t defend him well or they wouldn’t have stopped it, but we had the matchup we wanted. We really liked Roddy in that situation. We’ve run it a couple hundred times in practice and he just fumbled the ball. That’s not why we lost the game.”

The turnover gave Iowa the ball back with 24 seconds left, and the Buckeyes would have to foul to stop the clock. Iowa salted the game away at the line from there.

“I thought we had really good execution with the play the time before to get Jamison on a tight curl. That was really good. I thought Felix’s finish there late in the game was really good. But you certainly want to have that one back.

Why was Dale Bonner in at the end of the game?

With Iowa salting the game away in the final minute, Ohio State trailed 77-75 when Dale Bonner replaced Bowen Hardman with 11.2 seconds left. Patrick McCaffery had hit the first of two free throws, and when he sunk the second it put the Buckeyes down three and running out of time.

After hitting a 3-pointer earlier in the game, Bonner improved to 4 for 30 (13.3%) in his past 13 games. So why was he in the game for such a critical time where the Buckeyes were looking for a 3-pointer?

“We have a play that he’s drilled, that he has crushed, in a late-game deep 3-point situation,” Holtmann said. “He’s the best we have on our team with his quickness and his ability. We’ve seen him do it over and over and over in practice, so the ball was in the right guy’s hands in that situation. He just needed to get it off a little quicker.”

Bonner never got off a 3-point attempt. Iowa was able to foul him with 8.3 seconds left while ahead 78-75, and he missed the first but hit the second. When Iowa’s Payton Sandfort did the same with 7.6 seconds left, the Hawkeyes were again able to foul Bonner with 4.5 seconds left and their lead at 79-76.

The Baylor transfer hit the first and intentionally missed the second, but neither team was able to corral the rebound as time ran out. After playing a season-low 5:04 in the loss to the Illini, Bonner finished with 5 points and one rebound in 13:16.

Devin Royal flashed potential as Zed Key sat

In a season-high 17:21, freshman forward Devin Royal finished with 9 points on 4-of-8 shooting and added three rebounds off the bench for the Buckeyes. In his prior seven Big Ten appearances, Royal had averaged 3.7 points and 1.0 rebounds while playing 5.3 minutes per appearance but has started to come on as of late.

In 37 total minutes during Ohio State’s last three games, Royal has scored 20 points (6.7 per game). His production helped offset the second-shortest outing in Zed Key’s Ohio State tenure. The fourth-year center missed one shot, grabbed two rebounds and had one assist in only 3:14. It marked the least amount of playing time for Key since he totaled two minutes in a Dec. 8, 2020 game at Notre Dame – the fourth game of his career.

The Buckeyes also got 14 points on 5-of-7 shooting from sophomore starting center Felix Okpara, who in 31:26 pulled down seven offensive rebounds (eight total) and had two steals, two assists and a block.

ajardy@dispatch.com

@AdamJardy

Get more Ohio State basketball news by listening to our podcasts

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: 4 takeaways: Ohio State Buckeyes 'want it bad," Jamison Battle says