My brother graduated from UNI in 2003, just two years after I graduated from Creighton. This despite our three-year gap in age, and up until college, in school; I took the five-year route through college because then as now, I’m the last one to leave a party. I made numerous treks to Cedar Falls during his four years there, and would annually go for the Creighton-UNI basketball game. We’d get a few beers at whatever bar had the cheapest specials on The Hill, go to the game, then go back to that same bar, and close out the night with pizza at the Stein.
The Panthers played at the UNI-Dome back in those days, with the basketball court shoved against one side of the massive structure to utilize one-half of the stadium’s permanent seats. Temporary wooden — yes wooden — bleachers, about ten rows high, surrounded the other three sides of the court, with purple curtains behind them in an attempt to hide the football field lurking beyond. It was an awful venue to play in, although for pure basketball fans it was a surprisingly OK place to watch a game, particularly from the bleachers. Those wooden bleachers offered close views and the added bonus of entering and exiting via the same tunnel as the players, leading to some amusing exchanges.
In a league rich with tradition, UNI was perhaps the only program without an identity or much of a history. They had been D1 for just over 20 years, had been known as “State College of Iowa” as recently as the mid-1960s, and their D1 years included just one NCAA Tournament bid back in their Mid-Continent Conference days. By 2001 that seemed like an eternity ago, their one shining moment under Coach Eldon Miller a distant memory, the upset win over Top 10 Iowa in front of 22,000 fans at the dome a forgotten gem, Maurice Newby’s 35-foot buzzer beater to upset #3 seed Missouri a tale from a bygone era.
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Greg McDermott is a native of Cascade, Iowa, a town of just under 2,000 in eastern Iowa. In high school, the 6-8 McDermott was taller than most of the other players his school played, and as you’d expect, things went his way more often than not. In his senior year, he was named fourth team all-state by the Des Moines Register in basketball and was Most Valuable Player of the 1983 Dr. Pepper All-Star game, which ironically was played in the UNI-Dome. He also pitched and played first base for the Cascade high school team.
Recruited to play basketball for Northern Iowa, McDermott’s 1,033 career points currently ranks 24th on UNI’s all-time scoring chart. As a junior, he ranked 16th in the nation in field goal percentage at 58%, and shot even better his senior year when he hit shots at a 60% clip. He led the Panthers in shooting three straight years, combining for a 59.5% percentage.
His junior season, he ranked first in the Mid-Continent Conference in field goal percentage, fifth in blocked shots, seventh in rebounding and 10th in scoring, and earned second team all-conference honors. As a senior in 1987-88, he was third in the league in field goal percentage and fourth in free throw percentage, and was the team co-captain. That year, he was named a pre-season honorable mention all-American.
During his career as a Panther, he played in 110 games, shot a career field goal percentage of .581, accumulated a career free throw percentage of .743, and averaged 4.4 rebounds and 9.4 points. One season after he graduated, UNI would make their first NCAA Tournament.
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After that 1990 NCAA Tournament run, they played one more season in the Mid-Continent before joining the Valley, finishing 4th in their final year. Upon joining the Valley, they finished in the top 6 of the league just three times in their first decade, never higher than a tie for fourth, never winning more than 16 games. There was a near-Cinderella story in 1994 when they advanced to the MVC title game as a 5 seed, falling three points short of upending Southern Illinois and an NCAA berth, but their early Valley years were mostly marked by struggles.
Unlike fellow 90s import Evansville, who entered the league with their rafters full of DII National Championship banners, Northern Iowa had four wins in the 1964 NCAA DII tourney, the win over Missouri in 1990, and not much else. And in 1997, they lost the one thing they did have when the legendary Miller retired.
Sam Weaver, a former assistant at Iowa State, took over and in three seasons won just 34% of his games, going 9-18, 14-15 and 7-24, finishing 7th, 8th and dead last, respectively. In the process he squandered whatever energy existed around the program.
It was into that environment that Greg McDermott took over as head coach in the spring of 2001. A program 12 years removed from its only D1 postseason berth, playing in the corner of a football dome in front of 1500-3000 fans a night, in the shadow of the giant state U just an hour up the road which was at the height of the Steve Alford Era. With little fanfare and with low expectations, the former Panther standout hired a staff of peers in Ben Jacobson (the coach, not the player), Kyle Green and Ron Smith to help him rebuild the program.
At his introductory press conference, McDermott laid out his plans for rebuilding the Panthers.
“We’re going to do everything possible to build the core of our team from the high schools in the state of Iowa. I believe there is quality here. There are too many kids leaving the state to go play elsewhere. That’s not to say we won’t fill specific needs from the surrounding areas, but I recruited 15 Iowa players when I was in North Dakota and Nebraska. My staff and I are going to try to keep players in state and at the University of Northern Iowa. Some of the best teams throughout the history of Northern Iowa basketball have been comprised of Iowa players.
If you look at the kids we’ve signed, they want to be at Northern Iowa. They had other options and opportunities, but this is where they want to be. If that’s the case going in, you have a lot better chance to be successful with those people, not only on the basketball floor, but in the classroom and community.”
I heard about McDermott immediately from my brother, who interned at the campus rec center which housed the training facilities for the team. He said from his observations, the coaches were more personable, more approachable and that the players were working harder for them than for the previous staff. For the first time in his four years there watching the team closely, it appeared the players were on the same page, their eyes on the same goal. And the four games I saw in person (two CU-UNI matchups each in Cedar Falls and Omaha) seemed to back up his claims. I was impressed.
I also wondered how anyone could recruit kids to play in front of sparse crowds in a domed football stadium, but from the start, McDermott identified the types of players he wanted and then went out and got them, challenging Creighton for under-the-radar Iowa talent and building recruiting pipelines into Minnesota and Wisconsin. His teams were a reflection of the Cedar Valley they called home: tough, hard-nosed, making the most of what they had to compensate for what they didn’t. To make up for a lack of athleticism, they played tough defense and tried to control the pace. To make up for a lack of depth, they gave the majority of the minutes to six or seven players.
They might be beaten, but they were never outplayed or outcoached.
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McDermott immediately doubled the Panthers win total from 7 to 14 in his first season, scoring an average of 10 more points per game while giving up 3 fewer than the previous year. They slid to 11 wins in year two, but a promising freshman from Sioux City — Ben Jacobson (the player, not the coach) — seemed to indicate better days might lay ahead. And in year three, the Panthers, led by Jacobson and newcomer Erik Crawford from the Twin Cities, had a break-out season as they won 21 games and finished tied for second, their best season on both counts since 1990.
After winning a double-OT thriller in the MVC Championship Game over Barry Hinson’s snakebit SMS Bears, UNI earned the league’s automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament. A 14 seed, just as they’d been in 1990, the Panthers were matched up with 3 seed Georgia Tech in Milwaukee. It was the sort of first-round matchup that most people write off as a blowout. And early on, it was, with the Yellow Jackets taking a 17-point lead with a 30-8 first half run that erased an early 7-2 UNI lead. The Panthers would go on a run of their own: a 27-9 run that spanned halftime, to be specific, and when Erik Crawford hit a three with 21 seconds left, UNI was one possession away from an upset. They got the chance when Tech’s Jarrett Jack missed the front-end of a one-and-one, and even got the ball to the man they wanted to take the last shot. Sadly, Ben Jacobson’s attempted three clanged off the rim, and Georgia Tech escaped. It was the closest game the Yellow Jackets had the entire tournament until losing in the final to UConn.
Georgia Tech coach Paul Hewett told Sports Illustrated after the game,
“I came out of that game very impressed with Northern Iowa. We put a run on them early. We played a very good schedule this year and we’ve played teams that have folded when you put that type of run on them. They came back strong.”
In year four, McDermott and the Panthers were determined to build on their success and make sure the one-year wonder of 1990 didn’t repeat itself. Eric Coleman, a 6’6″ beast from Minnesota, joined the team and made an immediate impact, averaging 11 points and 7 rebounds while starting every game. Sophomore Grant Stout, a 6’8″ center, took over after the graduation of the entire Panther frontcourt and started every game, averaging 12 points and 8 rebounds. Meanwhile Crawford and Jacobson built on their 2004 campaigns, giving UNI four All-MVC-Caliber players. They again won 21 games, good for third in the league, and were awarded an at-large bid into the NCAA Tournament after falling to Missouri State in the semifinals of Arch Madness.
As an 11 seed in Oklahoma City, the Panthers took on Wisconsin and again played toe-to-toe with a BCS juggernaut. Employing what some might call a “junk” defense, they double-teamed Wisconsin’s best two players and dared others to beat them. The strategy worked, as the Panthers were able to keep the game close, as they hoped for a spark from their own offense that never came. Once again, they cut the lead to three with under a minute to play, but once again, they couldn’t get over the hump, missing shots on two consecutive possessions. The 57-52 loss stung, but with their starting five returning, there was excitement around the UNI program heading into the 2006 season.
Year five, which would be McDermott’s last in Cedar Falls, saw the Panthers collect non-conference road wins at #13 LSU and at Dayton. The veteran squad earned the first Top 25 ranking in school history in January, and despite finishing fifth in a loaded MVC, earned an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament, jumping over fourth-place Creighton to snag the fourth MVC bid and igniting Billy Packer into a blathering fool on national television.
Armed with a 10 seed and playing in Dayton, the Panthers fell to 7 seed Georgetown 54-49. Unlike the previous two years when the Panthers had come out sluggish in the first round and had to rally late to make the game close, they came out of the gates swinging against the Hoyas. Senior guard John Little was a big reason why, hitting four three-pointers in the first half as the Panthers took a 30-26 lead into halftime. But in the second half, the Hoyas used their 7’2″ center Roy Hibbert to dominate the paint, and with their post offense eliminated the outside shots stopped falling too. A dreadful 2-18 stretch to open the second half allowed Georgetown to take a lead, as Hibbert took over. He was 8-10 from the floor and grabbed nine rebounds, although he did foul out with a minute to play.
Two weeks later, McDermott took the Iowa State job, turning the program in Cedar Falls over to his top assistant, Ben Jacobson. UNI was about to open the sparkling McLeod Center, a nice on-campus facility that would give them a real basketball arena for the first time in the D1 history. And the tradition that started with Mac was about to be wildly surpassed by Jacobson.
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At some point I allowed my friends in Omaha to sour my opinion of McDermott, much to the chagrin of my brother who did not take kindly to me calling his coach a Wookie. I started looking more at the negatives and ignoring the massive positives, forgetting my initial impressions of the coach and shrugging off those stories from the inside my brother had told me back in 2001. It was fashionable to bash McDermott in Omaha, to be annoyed by his group of overachieving tough guys, and I joined in.
McDermott had a 2-9 record against Creighton, and never won a single game in Omaha. Combined with the unimpressive at-first-glance talent of his teams, it was easy to dismiss them and most did. I should have known better, but I gradually moved into the camp of people who bashed him. I carried this attitude into his tenure at Iowa State, his every stumble seeming to prove my point to my brother that McDermott was a bad coach, Jacobson’s every success at UNI seeming to prove that maybe it wasn’t McDermott behind all the winning those teams enjoyed.
This is the attitude that led me to go off the deep end when, late Sunday April 25, word leaked that Creighton had not only talked to him about the open job, but offered him the position. I had spent the weekend downplaying the possibility, ripping him at every turn, even arguing with a know-it-all in Des Moines who insisted McDermott was a perfect fit for Creighton. It culminated with me posting on a message board that if Creighton hired McDermott, I would give up my season tickets.
Then I went for a ten-mile stationary bike ride in my basement, and slept on the knowledge Mac was about to become the next coach of the Jays. When I woke up Monday morning, I tried to remember not what my fellow Jays fans had beaten into my head over the past decade, but what my brother had told me in 2001 — and more importantly, what my own first-hand impressions had been of McDermott back then.
I had forgotten what UNI was before he got there — those nights at the UNI-Dome in 1999 and 2000 when a couple thousand brave souls took as much room as they wanted in the mostly empty rows of the massive football stadium during games. They were a program with no history or tradition, playing in the worst venue in the league in a city as far off the beaten path as any in the Valley. Yet somehow he was able to recruit players to come play there, and once he got them there, he was able to coach them into winners. UNI’s tradition started on his watch, and what Ben Jacobson is doing now would not be possible without him.
When he took the podium at Sokol Arena last Tuesday and began his speech with a hilarious story, all the things my brother had told me about his outgoing personality came rushing back. And by the time Mac was done with the press conference, I was sold.
Greg McDermott is a good coach. Period. It’s a great hire, and there are exciting days ahead for Creighton as he leads them into the future.