No. 22 Baylor's "junk" defense leads to 72-70 win Sunday at No. 10 Iowa State

AMES — Audi Crooks ruffled the stat sheet and shook her head.

It’s a rare numbers-based reaction for Iowa State’s standout center, who entered Sunday’s top-25 matchup with Baylor leading the nation in scoring and ranked second in field goal percentage.

But Crooks shot just 2-for-9 from the field in the second half and the No. 10 Cyclones fell to the No. 22 Bears, 72-70, before a crowd of 10,832 at Hilton Coliseum.

Hence her dismay — and deepened resolve to grow from ISU’s first loss of the season.

“My field goal percentage? Trash to my standards,” said Crooks, who still scored 26 points and grabbed a team-high 10 rebounds as the Cyclones fell to 14-1 overall and 2-1 in Big 12 play. “That’s trash. And I can’t let that happen again. I mean, everybody has something that they should have done a lot better, and that we normally do do well.”

Dynamic point guard Jada Williams led ISU with a career-high 28 points, but needed 28 field goal attempts to reach that mark. Baylor (13-3, 2-1) decided late in the first half to put a hard double team on Crooks — who scored 14 points in 6-for-6 shooting in the first quarter — and leave Williams open looks on the perimeter.

“You just can’t let (Crooks) get what she wants,” said Bears head coach Nicki Collen, who led her team to its third straight win over Bill Fennelly’s Cyclones. “I don’t know how many games (she had) 30 point games in a row, but she’s just an elite scorer at the rim.”

It was five straight games Crooks had scored 30-plus, but Williams’ clutch play late almost thwarted that unique strategy.

Williams drained a career-high six 3-pointers on 17 attempts, and her second-chance swish from beyond the arc tied the game at 70-70 with 27 seconds left. But Baylor’s leading scorer Taliah Scott hit a tough midrange basket with 2.9 seconds left to put her team up, 72-70. ISU’s Addy Brown then tried to find Crooks on the block for a potential game-tying shot, but the Bears poked the ball away to secure a fourth win at Hilton in the past five meetings.

“It was a junk defense that we’d never seen,” said Williams, who also had seven assists. “Clearly it worked. (Collen’s) a smart coach, so props to her. I’ve gotta be better from the 3-point line, but I’ve been taking those shots with confidence. I practice those shots every single day. My teammates were pouring into me, so I was taking them with confidence and I think they’ll fall.”

Fennelly would like to see Williams shoot with even more confidence moving forward, as both Williams and backup point guard Reese Beaty — who returned after missing five games with a foot injury — hesitated to hoist up shots several times when left open.

“We are big here (about) shoot it before you throw it away,” Fennelly said.

Crooks said the Cyclones will have plenty to learn from and fix from their first loss. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing before Big 12 season clicks into high gear.

“You don’t want to be a monster in January,” she said. “You want to be a monster in March. And in order to do that, you need to recognize your flaws (and) you need to recognize your shortcoming, and if you don’t lose? If we would have won today, those rebounds that I missed seem a lot less significant. Those shots that I missed seem a lot less significant. Those turnovers that we had seem a lot less significant. But when you lose, it really puts everything out there. You have to look in the mirror and recognize what you need to do better. And because had that early? Oh, March. Yeah. Just, yeah.”

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