INDIANAPOLIS — Oklahoma State shot 55 percent, scored 91 points and outrebounded Michigan 40-21 … and lost a first round matchup with the Wolverines. The Cowboys were still trying to figure out how several minutes after the game.

Michigan got 26 points and 11 assists from Derrick Walton Jr. and shot 11-for-15 from three-point range in the second half to pull out the win in an unbelievably entertaining 7-10 game, a 92-91 win.

“Tremendous amount of credit to Michigan. They're a very, very good basketball team, played extremely well today,” Oklahoma State coach Brad Underwood said. “You run into so many problems with trying to defend Michigan, and John [Beilein] does a great job of spacing the floor. They have so many shooters.

“It gets hard to take everything away from them. I thought the first half, we were very good at defending the three-point line, trying to keep them in front of us. We did a great job on Walton the first half. He only had seven. But, again, the second half was ... you go 11 of 15 from the three, that's hard to do in a gym by yourself. And they hit some hard shots. Give them credit.”

The Cowboys hit their share, too, and never quit. U-M was up 86-79, but missed free throws (two friend ends by Duncan Robinson) and a banked triple down the stretch kept Oklahoma State within striking distance.

“Today, we just weren't good enough, and give a lot of credit to Michigan,” Underwood said. “We do the same thing. We see it every day in practice. We weren't the number one offensive team in the country from an efficiency standpoint [for no reason]. It's one of those deals … we shot 55 percent in the NCAA tournament and just lost in the first round. The game is evolving into this. This goes against basically every stereotype you know.

“It's one I've got to grasp … out-rebound an opponent 40-21 and lose. The game's changing. The three-point line is changing that way. We saw teams in our league that did the same thing. In the Big Ten tournament, Derrick Walton took 51 shots that were not break-away steal layups. Forty-five of them were jump shots, and so switching was going to ... you know, they were the third percentile in the country in post-ups.”

Or as Louisville coach Rick Pitino noted after his team beat Jacksonville State, ‘we’re about to play the Golden State Warriors.’ U-M has become that efficient at what it does, and on Friday that meant outscoring the nation’s No. 1 offensive team.

“We just had a few lapses on defense, and when you play a team like Michigan, you can't do that,” Oklahoma State’s Phil Forte said. “And when you get into a scoring match and you don't score, obviously they're going to make a little run.”

“It was a matter of trying to stop them from shooting in the paint and step-in threes,” Underwood said. “We wanted to force them to dribble if they wanted to go up [our big guys]. To their credit, they made some shots. If you get into a rotation game with them in terms of hedging ball screens or doing that, you are going to lose because they pass it so well. They play so well together.

"I felt pretty good about it. We worked on it a great deal and, for the most part, the only thing that hurt us in the first half was Wilson had six offensive rebounds or three offensive rebounds. But, like I said, there's a little give and take when you play Michigan.”

They even got the kind of up and down game they wanted, Underwood noted. It still wasn’t enough.

“We score a lot of ways, and tempo was good for us,” he said. “You sit there and you look … I talked about the rebounding difference. You talk about 50 points in the paint and you lose. The game's changing. To their credit, when you make threes, you've got a great chance to win.”

Especially when that number is 16 in 29 attempts.