Despite being featured on the Sports Illustrated cover, the Hawkeyes remain focused.
By Kyle Mann
[email protected]
It’s been under a week since the Iowa men’s basketball team suffered its first conference loss on Jan. 28, on the road at Maryland, but the Hawkeyes ultimately didn’t suffer much at all.
They fell from No. 3 to No. 5 in the AP Poll, and they have now receivedmore attention than before.
Jarrod Uthoff and the Hawkeyes graced the cover of Sports Illustrated, the first time in school history that both the football team and basketball team have been featured in the same academic year.
ESPN’s Joe Lunardi projects the Hawkeyes as a No. 1 seed in March’s NCAA Tournament, and with Uthoff making a name for himself nationally, the Hawkeyes have plenty of distractions swirling around them. That is, if they cared about any of it.
“It’s pretty neat,” Uthoff said, dismissively. “To me it’s about us, it’s the Hawkeyes what we’ve accomplished as a team … people predicted us at the bottom of the Big Ten, and we’re proving we can play with anybody.”
Uthoff’s nonchalant temperament, which at one point raised questions, has in fact turned into the shared mindset on the team. Particularly on a team with four seniors in the starting lineup, the Hawkeyes have a remarkably composed feel to them that liberates them from outside pressure.
But another vital component to Iowa’s surprising season has been the play from the bench, featuring younger players such as sophomore Dom Uhl and freshmen Nick Baer and Ahmad Wagner. As prominent of a role as the seniors play on the court, head coach Fran McCaffery has lauded them for their tutoring of the younger generation.
“Our upperclassmen collectively do a good job with our younger guys,” he said. “They respect each other’s ability to take care of their own business. It’s really important for the young guys to understand that’s necessary.”
McCaffery has ensured he gets his young players meaningful reps in games, and he was able to inject a lot of his underclassmen into Sunday’s game against Northwestern. Although they weren’t as crisp as he would have liked without veterans alongside them, the coach said, the players learned from the opportunity and responded “professionally” in practice.
Iowa still managed to win the game by double digits, and as has been its mantra all season long, continued to improve along the way.
Although they don’t seem to be influenced by it, the Hawkeyes are aware of the excitement on campus and take pride in adding to the impressive 2015-16 athletics season for the university.
“It’s really cool to get national recognition like that; I think it’s a lot of fun for our university with the season football had and now the season that we’re having,” Mike Gesell said. “It’s exciting times to be a Hawkeye.”
The Hawkeyes will ride their 8-1 Big Ten record and No. 5 national ranking into tonight’s matchup with Penn State in Carver-Hawkeye. The Nittany Lions are 2-7 in the conference and could offer another opportunity for a relatively “easy” win, though there seem to be none of those in the Big Ten, McCaffery has said. The game will tip at 6 p.m.