Indiana vs. Penn State: Full Homersota Preview

The place: Assembly Hall, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

The teams: The Pennsylvania State Scarfed Bear-looking Creatures (aka the Penn State Nittany Lions) and your Indiana Hoosiers!

What's at stake: At this point in the season for both teams, it's Just Win, Baby time.

What does Vegas say: Opened at Indiana -8, has not moved yet.

What does the Nittany Lion say:

via <a href="http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/askville/5882212_24222728_mywrite/lion2.jpg">g-ecx.images-amazon.com</a>

(He doesn't understand what's going on with the B1G either.)

The current mood of IU fans right now, judging solely by the iubb hashtag: Difficult to discern, as this team has been.

How important is this game on a scale of 1-10, where 1 is an exhibition game and 10 is the National Championship: 7, because this is a game IU needs to win, but it's not a Big Ten Tourney, NCAA tourney, or national title game.

Over/under number of nets Coach Crean will cut down if we win this game: 0.5

My completely biased, barely researched analysis: As not-terrible as they've looked this year, this is still Penn State. And Indiana should beat Penn State in basketball 9 out of 10 times all of the time. We cannot afford to let this be the 10th time if we want any hope of being in the NCAAs.

Reasonable score prediction: Indiana 77, Penn State 72

FULL HOMERSOTA prediction: Indiana 80, Penn State 65