The Shot, The Charge and the Biggest Win In UNI Basketball History - An Oral History of the 2010 Win over Kansas
3/20/2020
A decade ago, the UNI men’s basketball team pulled off one of the most memorable upsets in NCAA March Madness history. The win over Kansas is seared in the minds of college basketball fans, but there was so much more to the story than the dagger shot that everyone remembers. The lead up to the game began more than a year earlier. There are moments from illegal socks to a game day snow storm that made the weekend in Oklahoma City one of the most interesting in UNI athletics and March Madness.
Here are the accounts as told by some of those involved from players, coaches, team staff and veteran CBS play-by-play voice Kevin Harlan.
MOMENTUM BUILDING
When you look at that team, you have to look at the season before. About January 1 in 2009, we ramped it up in practice. Those guys were competing hard every day in practice. The practices were the most competitive that I have been a part of. They were running over each other so when it came to games, it was easier to play against opponents than it was to go against each other.
We had an older team, we had been through this as a group, the starting five had been together for two years now, which was huge. We played in the tournament the year before so we went into the weekend with a different mindset. The thrill wasn’t gone but we had the mindset that we would go to the tournament and win some games, our overall goal was to make the final four.
It was tough to prepare for our team. We had seven guys that scored 20 points in a game. Adam was the Player of the Year in the league, but he was an unselfish player that was going to do whatever was asked of him. Our starters were great and our bench was really good. Jake Koch, kind of came into his own from the end of the year through the conference tournament. At the end of the day, nobody cared who started and who scored. They enjoyed being around each other, played together and won basketball games. That is what made them so special.
ON TO OKLAHOMA CITY
After making the tournament in 2009, 2010 was a little easier because I knew what I was doing. It is a quick turnaround and technology wasn’t 100% where it is now, so it was a little more pencil and paper. Sunday night after the selection show is a lot of work to make sure the travel stuff is all lined up, the practice locations are set and we are all ready to go. You stay at the office until it is done Sunday, because you could be leaving Tuesday.
The UNLV team was a good team. They were in the tournament. It was a battle, getting that nine seed. They had some good players on that team, it was a battle, it wasn’t a cake walk at all.
UNLV
When we played UNLV, we had been to the tournament already and had a taste from our loss the year before. I think that we had more of a confidence in our abilities. The UNLV game is always overshadowed because of the Kansas game, but It was a good game, it was a close game. I think we were confident that we could come out on top. We were confident that we could win.
We bought our guys all new Nike socks. A lot of the socks at the time had Nike logos on both sides which was against the rules. You could only have one logo on each garment. We took the court and the refs come over to say, ‘you guys have illegal socks.’ They were brand new and the only game socks that we brought so Don Bishop and I scrambled together and anyone that didn’t have ankle braces, we had to put athletic tape over one of the Nike logos to make them legal.
Everyone talks about the Kansas game, but that was the fifth time as a staff we made the tournament and we had never won a game before that trip. It was awesome to get that first win and to get to play again. It was something that we had not done. To be able to go out, perform well against UNLV and keep are season going was great. Everyone wants to be a part of the NCAA tournament. You want to win games and keep your season going.
The game was tied late and Ali’s shot put us up three. Kwadzo stayed on the dribble and avoided being trapped multiple times. They are running around trying to trap Kwadzo who navigates that then gets the ball to John who gets it to Ali. Many times that sequence gets forgotten. Those 30 seconds are a remarkable 30 seconds, if that doesn’t happen, maybe we don’t win that game. Under any other circumstances, if we don’t go and beat the No. 1 team, that 30 seconds would get a ton of play, because it was a remarkable 30 seconds.
We knew Ben and the kind of program that he runs. I knew the Koch boys from the Green Bay area and my parents grew up in Des Moines so Northern Iowa wasn’t just another team for me. Personally, I was familiar with what they had done and I felt like I had a real tie to that team. Then, of course, Kansas was my alma mater and the No. 1 overall seed. They were the number one team in college basketball for most of the season. This is one of the elite teams in that tournament.
It began with that 8-9 game with Ali Farokhmanesh hitting that game winner so he was already on our radar. To be honest, I don’t think that anyone gave UNI a chance against Kansas because they were just so strong. They were devastatingly good. They were picked by so many people to win it and for sure make the final four.
It was exciting, just the weight of that game and the way it ended with the buzzer beater was amazing. Realizing you are moving to the next round, once you get to the end of your career and every game is played to play another game, it really is an incredible feeling. I think we made the shift that night. The next morning we were full go with personnel and film on Kansas.
When the pairings come out, you are looking at the opponents and it was Kansas and Lehigh. I had the scout for the second round and if I’m totally honest, I spent 95% of my time on Kansas. I probably would have been more concerned if Lehigh would have won that game.
When the Kansas game was over, I was locked in and going back to the hotel to meet with the coaches and get the game plan finalized to present to the players. We watched film that night to get ready to go. You don’t get a lot of time to enjoy that victory. It is a kind of a relief and time to get ready to go.
PREPARATIONS
When you get the assignments early in the week, I remember looking at Ali’s name and wondering, ‘How the heck do I say that.’ I can remember saying that a lot out loud to get the name down right and after a while of saying it over and over and over again, it kind of rolls off of the tongue a little bit. We get a charge early in the week to remember that a lot of these schools don’t get on national TV a lot. It is our job to make them feel like we’re giving them just as much coverage as we give Kansas or UNLV.
We certainly believed that we could win.
They had a really close home game against Cornell who had a big seven footer like we did with Jordan and played a similar system. We saw a path. There was a game plan there for us. We knew that we matched up well and we knew we had to find a way to guard Sherron Collins and Kwadzo matched up with him. It wasn’t as if we were watching film saying, "what are we going to do?" We knew we could match up. It was just a matter of the guys going out and executing the plan.
We felt like we had a team that could win. If we played good enough defense, we could be in any game with any team. We weren’t going to go out and drop 90 points on someone, but we weren’t afraid to use 30 seconds of a shot clock to get a good shot or play 30 seconds of defense to get a stop.
GAME DAY
When I got up and opened the drapes to a snowstorm, being a North Dakota guy, I thought, you know, I think we are probably going to play pretty good today.
I vividly remember the bus ride from the hotel to the arena in Oklahoma City on the day of the KU-UNI game. Director of Basketball Operations Derrik Netten leaned over to me as we got behind a police escort and said, 'you don’t get these every day.' We shared a chuckle and enjoyed our effortless ride to the arena. It was like ‘pinch-me’ is this happening?
The bus was quiet, everyone was locked in and ready to go. It was silent. We were ready to go there and play our best game. We were ready to go out and do what we do at a high level.
Before the game, some of the Kansas players were standing at half court talking trash to us, that got us fired up. I remember that I didn’t understand what they were doing. Nobody had gone out of their way to be disrespectful to our team so to have someone standing at half court, trashing our team was surprising. Not that you need extra motivation, but that certainly provided it if we didn’t have it.
Our team was a team that was very mentally and physically tough. We made people work for everything they got and were really physical on defense. I don’t want to generalize and say we were farm boys from Iowa, but a lot of our guys were. We were physical and tough and to have someone light a fire under us like that was surprising. They were Kansas, they had probably never heard of us before the week we were scheduled to play. They didn’t know who they were playing against and the makeup of our team.
They thought they could come in there and roll us. You come out an hour before tip and we have one side of the court and they have one side of the court. They thought that they could use part of our side of the court, which I wasn’t too fond of. They could stay on their half. I walked out there and told them to stay on their half. They proceeded with the trash talking, I can’t remember what they said, and obviously it probably isn’t for publication. I thought well, we’ll just lace em’ up and see what happens when the dust settles.
It fired me up. What gives you the right to trash talk us when you don’t have any idea how physical we can be? You have no idea what kind of team we are. Obviously, we came out of the gate and went up 10-2 before Bill called a timeout and they were like, ‘Oh, s***, they can play a little bit. This is going to be difficult.’
The guys were confident and excited to play the game. They were looking to prove themselves. We were the clear underdogs, but the guys were loose ready to play and wanted to show the country who they were. My stomach was doing backflips, but I was trying to act like I knew what I was doing.
TIPOFF
Kansas is basketball royalty and you get this in the tournament, a lot of these smaller schools play the blue bloods and they look at the jersey or they look at the crowd. Just the aura of Bill Self, John Calipari or Mike Krzyzewski and sometimes that alone will psyche out a team. Ben had them so ready to go. They were so confident and played with such swagger. They never, ever blinked.
We got to the first media timeout with a big lead and we really believed. We got out and played really well and made a couple shots. It went from, we can do this to we are going to do this. You could see it in their eyes. That first four or five minutes they could see the game plan come together and they really believed it when they had the plan come together.
Having a lead at the first media timeout was a big deal. Momentum plays a factor in those big games. As a team, mentally there is more sway in college athletics than professional. Those mental swings play a big part in the game. Coming out and hitting a bunch of shots really helped us firmly establish the momentum on our side.
Scouting report wise, we knew that their big guy, Cole Aldrich, had a funny free throw motion. He had a pause in it that drew a lot of people into lane violations. I had drilled into our guys, ‘don’t step into the lane, be ready.’ We watched it on film three or four times. I had drilled it into their head over and over again. The guys teased Jordan Eglseder that he was going to get a lane violation all week and sure enough, first time out, Jordan steps right into the lane. Moments like that you remember are kind of hilarious.
Defensively, we were executing very well. We forced a couple of turnovers with our post doubles in the first half and we had a great trap that forced a jump ball against Collins late in the first half. We were checking all of the boxes.
HALFTIME
At that point, we were trying to anticipate what kind of adjustments they were going to make. We felt really good about where we were at. It was just a lot of reminders. Halftimes and timeouts are so long in tournament games so that kind of adds to the anxiety.
We were excited, no doubt, but we had an older team, we had been through this as a group, the starting five had been together for two years now, which was huge, we came together and didn’t have to do anything different. We had to get ready and play another 20 minutes.
SECOND HALF
You knew it was going to be a battle. Coach Self and his guys aren’t going to roll over. You need to compete for 40 minutes. They are going to try to impose their will on you eventually. You have to be able to take their punches, because they are going to throw them.
Coach Jake was so calm and collected the whole half, which helped us. He never freaked out, he kept us calm and collected and that set the tone for the team. We had situations where it would have been easy to freak-out but he never let the game get to him and that helped us. You have to give Coach Jake a lot of credit for that.
At the under four-minute timeout, the on-site media coordinator came over to the scorer’s table to talk with me and the Kansas SID Chris Theisen. We went over postgame protocols and it was brought up to Chris that if Kansas lost that CBS would want to talk with Bill Self outside the Kansas locker room. Yet another pinch-me moment – this is really happening.
At that point in the game, you don’t have as much control, that is where you lean on the experience of the guys. Even though they made a couple baskets and made a run, our guys never wavered in our confidence. We were loose, I mean Ali threw a behind the back pass in the second half and that doesn’t happen without a lot of confidence. We never got that feeling like we were in trouble.
THE SHOT
What made our team so good is that our bigs could really handle the ball. Having Ali on the backend of the press to finish plays and make teams pay for pressing us was part of the plan. I’m not sure it was the plan to shoot that shot, but that was the plan going into it. We got it quickly to Kwadzo and he got it up to Ali. I am thinking about a million things and you don’t have much time to process everything that is happening.
The defender from Kansas, his initial move was towards him when he caught it, but Johnny was on the left wing and he felt him back there. He didn’t want to go to Ali and give a layup to Johnny. I understand why he backed up, but as soon as he did, the next thought I had was, ‘Ali is going to shoot it.’
We got the ball in and almost turned the ball over twice, but Kwadzo threw it ahead to me. The defender was back. I looked and he kind of backed off. I knew we were going to have to take a shot and I figured that was going to be the best look we were going to get that possession so I took it.
I was thinking run some clock off, but he pulls up and shoots it. I am not going to lie, I was thinking, oh, God no, but when it went in, yeah that was a great shot!
If it had been uncensored, we would have said, 'HOLY S***. Oh my god, what is this kid doing?' When it came down to that play, he swept conventional wisdom aside, they could have held the ball, worked the ball around and ate the clock, but he took the three and he MADE it! My goodness, what is in this kid! He is fearless. This is number one Kansas, this is a nationally televised game. People are picking Kansas to go all the way and here is this kid that has a hard name to say making a big-time shot in the tournament.
I think it takes it a certain type of person to err on the side of aggressiveness and not dribble it out and pass it. I don’t think most guys would do that, but that is a testament to Ali’s aggression and him not taking a more timid approach to the game. I give Ali all the credit for taking the shot and making it.
THE CHARGE
I know I am supposed to say, oh man, I can’t believe he shot it, but that isn’t the truth. Because of the way that he played and the way that our team played, there wasn’t a player that was surprised that he shot it and certainly nobody was surprised he made it. Everyone in the arena was in shock, but our guys immediately shifted to defense and trying to get one stop to clinch the game.
After I made the shot it was exciting but I knew there was still time left and we needed to get back on defense. Once Jake took the charge that’s when I knew the game was over. That was the celebration that gets remembered, everything we worked for came out in that moment. I’ll always remember that moment, that’s what makes everything worth it.
There are certain plays that are better for the highlight reel, but that was a winning play. It was just as significant a play as anything else and that was consistent with the identity of our team, how we operated, how we played and how we were.
A lot of these games blend together to be quite honest, but there are always the few moments or big shots that stand out. You remember the kids that hit these big shots. The kid made this legend.
You can’t say his name to anyone that follows the tournament that doesn’t know what they were doing when he hit that shot to beat the number one seed in the tournament.
