Northern Iowa winning with team-first approach

Published 9:00 am Thursday, March 25, 2010

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.”

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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.

Northern Iowa’s rotation runs 10 deep, and they all think the same way. The best 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.

Koch averages 11.6 points and 4.9 boards per game, but he won the Valley’s top honor by being the most valuable player on the league’s best team. Ahelegbe scored 24 points in the Valley title game to earn tournament MVP honors, and Moran leads the team in steals.