CEDAR FALLS, Iowa (AP) -At a packed news conference at a Cedar Falls sports bar this week, Northern Iowa coach Ben Jacobson was asked if his team needed more out of Missouri Valley Player of the Year Adam Koch.
The forward’s recent numbers haven’t popped off the box score the way a league MVP’s stats usually do this time of year.
“No,” Jacobson said. “We don’t.”
Why would they, anyway? The reason the ninth-seeded Panthers (30-4) are in the NCAA tournament’s round of 16 and facing a matchup with fifth-seeded Michigan State (26-8) on Friday night is because of their balance.
Northern Iowa doesn’t have anyone who’ll get into this year’s NBA draft without a ticket. But that hardly matters to the Panthers.
While some teams spread the ball around because they don’t have anyone good enough to take over games, the Panthers view their unselfish approach as the strength of their team.
shot is the one taken by whoever is open, and defense and rebounding are everyone’s main focus.
“We don’t rely on one or two guys to get our points, get a lot of our plays. It’s just whoever is in that opportunity, we’ve got confidence that they’re going to make the play or knock the shot down,” Koch said. “We have that trust in each other.”
That team-first philosophy has been hammered home by Jacobson in his four years as head coach of the Panthers. Now, he’s got a veteran team that has bought into that philosophy completely and can execute it to near-perfection.
Northern Iowa’s starting five; guards Kwadzo Ahelegbe, Ali Farokhmanesh and Johnny Moran, center Jordan Eglseder and Koch, have been together for two years now. The Panthers know that any one of them can be the star on any given night.
Farokhmanesh has done it in the NCAA tournament, of course, with a game-winning 3-pointer against UNLV and a brassy 3 that stunned top-seeded Kansas 69-67 in the second round, but he’s still just the team’s fourth-leading scorer.
Eglseder leads the Panthers with 12 points and 7.3 rebounds per game, and his career-high five blocks helped Northern Iowa beat Wichita State, 67-52, in the Missouri Valley tournament title game.
the Valley title game to earn tournament MVP honors, and Moran leads the team in steals.
The team numbers are the ones that matter for the Panthers, though.
They’re 8-1 in games decided by five points or less and 21-0 when scoring at least 60 points. Northern Iowa also ranks in the top 25 nationally in free throw percentage and fewest turnovers and fouls per game.
Oh, and the Panthers have the nation’s second-best defense at just 55 points allowed per game.
“We say it all the time. Confidence in each other. Whenever one person isn’t having such a good game, someone else rises to the occasion and picks up the slack,” said junior Lucas O’Rear, the two-time MVC Sixth Man of the Year. “That’s how I think we’re effective. We spread the ball around, and you can’t just guard one or two people on our team. You’ve got to guard all five.”
Michigan State coach Tom Izzo noticed that, too, while watching film of the Panthers this week.
“Everybody that’s told me said, ‘Don’t watch too close because, you know, they don’t look like your typical great team.’ I mean, they’ve got big guys that, one of them doesn’t move that well but he’s efficient as heck. He’s their leading scorer. Two of them are big but they’re very, very athletic,” Izzo said. “The guards are small, so you know, you look at that and you question it. But then you realize who they’ve beaten and you go from there.”
ame, Jacobson reviewed the tape to make sense of Koch’s outing. What he found was that Koch mostly played a supporting role that helped his teammates make the critical plays.
Jacobson also knows that if it’s Koch’s turn to put up points against Michigan State, he’ll be ready for it.
“It just reinforced how unselfish he is. He doesn’t feel like he has to take shots just to take shots,” Jacobson said. “That’s very important when you’ve got the MVP of the league, and he’s just willing to continue to be unselfish.”
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