OSU wins first as No. 1

Associated Press

COLUMBUS

It wasn’t Ohio State coach Thad Matta’s idea to drill his players on defense this week.

It was theirs.

David Lighty scored 18 points and Ohio State wasn’t tested in its first game as No. 1, rolling over Iowa 70-48 on Wednesday night.

“It was funny, in the film session on Monday they kind of said, ‘Hey, looking at the scores we’ve given up, we can play better [defensively] than this,”’ Matta said. “So I told them before the game, ‘You’re the ones who said that, now we’ve got to go out and back it up.’ I thought they did that.”

The Buckeyes (19-0, 6-0 Big Ten) improved to 60-4 when ranked first in The Associated Press poll.

Shaky at times on offense, they set the tone and tenor with their defense right out of the box.

“They got us off to a slow start,” Iowa coach Fran McCaffery said. “You go on the road, you play a team of this caliber, you need to get off to a good start offensively. You need some buckets, you need to settle down, you need to get some type of flow. We never had a flow. Every basket we got in the first half was a struggle.”

Up 40-23 at halftime, the Buckeyes reeled off seven of the first nine points of the second half to push the lead to 22. The outcome wasn’t in doubt the rest of the way.

William Buford had 15 points and Jared Sullinger added 13 for the Buckeyes, topping the polls for the first time since the final three weeks of the 2006-07 regular season. That season’s team went to the national championship game, losing to defending champion Florida and finishing with a 35-4 record.

Lighty said nothing changed for the Buckeyes by moving up a spot in the rankings to replace Duke, which had been on top all season.

“From our point of view, nothing was really different at all,” he said. “We approached the game the same way, practiced the same way — just worrying about us and getting better.”

Four players had four assists apiece for the Buckeyes. Aaron Craft set an Ohio State freshman record with seven steals, tying for the second-most ever at the school behind Troy Taylor’s eight.