The clips are everywhere this time of year, especially this year, now that it’s the 10-year anniversary of Northern Iowa’s most recent NCAA Tournament appearance.
There’s the most well-known one, Paul Jesperson hitting the half-court prayer to beat Texas in the first round that year.
And then there’s the more painful one, blowing a 12-point lead to Texas A&M with about 30 seconds to play two nights later in the second round.
“Yeah, yeah, that was one hell of a weekend,” Northern Iowa head coach Ben Jacobson said Friday. “I’m certain that many of you watched it, right?”
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Jacobson was there those nights, pacing the sideline in front of his Panther bench, and he’ll be doing the same Friday night against No. 5 St. John’s. In between, though, has been a long, 10-year journey. Northern Iowa had made four tournaments in eight years back in 2016, but this is the first time we’ve seen them in the Big Dance since. And Jacobson has been there for all of it.
“When we won last week, and we beat UIC for our championship, people asked a lot about, ‘okay, man, it’s been 10 years,’” Jacobson said. ”I’ve told them like, these guys don’t know anything about that, right? And they’re the most important part of this story, if you will, are our players. They don’t know anything about the 10 years.”
After that fateful night in Oklahoma City, UNI struggled through three years, then were the MVC regular season champs in 2020 before getting upset in the MVC tournament. Not long after that, the transfer portal and NIL changed the world of college athletics, but not Jacobson’s approach as the leader of the program.
In a world where some teams – like their opponents, St. John’s led by Rick Pitino – thrive in the portal, Jacobson’s UNI has been very high-school-recruit focused, with intentions on keeping players that come for the long haul. Eleven guys returned to the UNI roster from last year.
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“We take a ton of pride in [returning much of our roster],” Jacobson said.
“We haven’t changed our recruiting philosophy. It’s a question that we had to answer the same as everybody else four years ago. What are we going to do here?” he said. “Our answer at that time was to continue as best as we can, continue to do it the way we’ve been doing it. And that is recruit high school players and get them in the program, so that—Tytan Anderson being a fifth-year guy, and Trey Campbell being a four-year starter, it continues to start there, with high school players.”
“Our entire roster, our entire program, we’ve got our group back,” he said. “Got our freshmen coming in. We need a power forward, and we need a point guard. Or we need a guy who can really shoot it in the backcourt, or we need a center. We’ll use the portal for that. The portal’s been really important to us, but that is on a need basis for us.”
That roster was, for much of the season, the leading scoring defense in the country. They had the best assist-to-turnover ratio in the Missouri Valley Conference. Ball security has been a huge ingredient of their success.
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“It’s huge just trying to take care of the ball, being strong with it, playing through contact, and just being more physical than the other team,” senior forward Ben Schweiger said. “And then just sharing the ball on the offensive end, just getting it moving, and just keep that movement going.”
“We say physicality, that’s the biggest thing coming into this game,” UNI leading scorer Trey Campbell said. “Big physicality, rebounding. Obviously, they’re a big physical team. We’ve got to hold them to that.”
They go against the St. John’s Red Storm and the legendary Pitino. Though Jacobson and Pitino haven’t crossed paths much, Jacobson’s got a lot of respect for him.
“Obviously, he’s as good as there is,” Jacobson said. “It comes down to his attention to detail and [how they] compete like crazy. Man, his teams are going to do those things.”
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UNI will be an underdog, but they’ve been that before. This year became the first team to win four games in four days in a conference tournament to punch their ticket to the dance.
“I think it’s just the belief that we can do it. We have high expectations for our team, and we really don’t care what seed we are,” sophomore guard Will Hornseth said. “We saw it there as a six seed, winning four games in four days, and hopefully you see it here too.”
And they were underdogs for perhaps their most famous game in program history, when they upset Kansas in the second round of the 2010 tournament to really put them on the map. Jacobson was the coach then, too.
“I’ve watched the clip a few times. It’s pretty cool,” said Leon Bond III, one of their few transfers. “I’m pretty sure it’s in our intro video, so seeing that every time we play, it’s been really cool. Just a little extra motivation.”
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From that high of highs, to the low of lows six years later, Jacobson is the first to admit that the pain of the last loss didn’t wash away immediately.
“I’ll tell you, it took a good two, three years for me, just rolling through in my mind, because as coaches and as leaders, I think we feel such a strong responsibility to make sure, in my case as a coach, our players are in the best possible position to be successful,” he said. “And we were there. We were there against Texas. We were there against A&M. so it took me a while to figure out, man, what in the world could you have done different. That’s more about me and my coaching.”
But most importantly?
“These guys don’t know anything about that.”
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UNI tips off at 7:10 ET in San Diego on CBS.
