Once again there are zero mid-majors in the Sweet 16, but that doesn’t mean we can’t grasp at straws here.
Iowa, led by former Drake head coach Ben McCollum, knocked off reigning national champion Florida 73-72 Sunday to advance to the program’s first Sweet 16 since 1999.
McCollum spent one year at Drake and went 31-4. Despite adding on a tournament win for the Bulldogs last season, when McCollum took the Iowa job following a productive year, there were more than a few questions raised at his recruiting strategy in Ames. McCollum almost literally took all of his players (those that had eligibility of course) from that successful season in the MVC and brought them over to the Hawkeyes. Bennett Stirtz. Cam Manyawu. Tavion Banks. Kael Combs. Isaia Howard. Joey Matteoni.
Sprinkle in the finishing touch of Alvaro Folgueiras from Robert Morris and returning Cooper Koch from the McCaffery era, it seemed as if he was confident in his squad that had been with him this whole time, and in fact, one of them had.
Stirtz, now a consensus first-round draft pick and an All-American point guard for the Hawkeyes, has been with McCollum ever since their DII days at Northwest Missouri State in Saint Joseph, Mo., where he led the Bearcats to four national championships out of the MIAA conference (basically the DII SEC).
“Into his freshman year, I remember our first scrimmage, we played a team called Wayne State out of Nebraska, and he was God awful, and I mean awful,” McCollum said of Stirtz. “I remember sitting there thinking, he got done, he’s like, ‘Coach, do you even think I can play?’ — I don’t think he asked me that but gave me that look, do you think I can play at this level? I think I said, ‘Yeah, you’ll be fine.’ The next game we played a Division I, and he had 25. The rest is history. Freshman year, he was great. Sophomore year, he was second-team all conference, and last year, he was MVP of the league. I think the biggest thing you saw is him understanding how good he was. I think a lot of our players, we recruit to humility, we recruit to guys who want to serve their teammates. So, naturally sometimes their humility can be so strong that they don’t understand how good they actually are. That was him. So, you just had to bring out some of that, like, edge and hey, you are this good to him, and that’s what you see now.”
Since then, success had come easy to the duo of head coach and point guard until this season, where they found their match in the form of Big Ten basketball. The Hawkeyes finished an even .500 in league play, benefiting off a weak bubble to earn the 9-seed in this year’s tournament.
“Did I know we were going to win like this? I didn’t think we were going to lose,” McCollum said after the win. “It’s like the old deal of — it always drove me crazy and I said this last year at one point: Did you expect to be 23-11? I said, no, I didn’t expect to lose those 11 games. You shouldn’t go into a season and expect to lose a game. That’s not what it is.”
Despite losing more games in a season than he has ever in his career, McCollum is now moving onto the second weekend of the highest level of college basketball, with a rivalry game against the Nebraska Cornhuskers set in his sights.
