A little self-awareness can often go a long way, be it basketball-related or otherwise. Consider the case of the Iowa State Cyclones, erstwhile bottom-dwellers-turned-Sweet 16 challengers who are decidedly Not Supposed To Be Here. Iowa State did not arrive in Chicago this week as winners of a beauty contest, coming off two upset wins in which neither team scratched 60 points. But here they are.
“We're not going to apologize for how we have to win,” head coach T.J. Otzelberger said, “and we're not going to apologize for aesthetically how it may look.”
The Cyclones arrived as Cinderellas of note nonetheless. Power 5 teams with low seeds have gotten hot in March before; no Division I team of any standing has made the turnaround from winning two games the year prior—yes, you read that correctly—all the way to the second weekend of the tourney. Granted, these are, as literally as possible, not the same Cyclones: In his first season at the helm, Otzelberger brought in a small army of transfers and held on to just one regular from last year’s team. They are now 22–12, having taken their lumps and set to face No. 10 Miami, another team that’s gotten hot at the right time.
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On second thought, hot may not be the appropriate aesthetic descriptor. While the 11-seed Cyclones held LSU and Wisconsin under 60 points, they also kept themselves beneath that threshold, shooting just 35% from the field against the Tigers and 34% against the Badgers. They rate 160th nationally in KenPom’s adjusted offensive efficiency, placing them 15th out of the 16 teams that made the second weekend of the tourney, ahead of only Saint Peter’s.
But they do have the nation’s fifth-best defense by those metrics, the fourth-best defensive turnover rate and have held opponents to 28.7% shooting from three-point range.“We’re asking our guys to do really hard things all the time and give multiple efforts,” Otzelberger says. “It's not just pressure the ball, it's pressure the ball, sprint to the gap, block out, rebound down continually.”
Otzelberger took over from Steve Prohm, who led the Cyclones to three 20-win seasons in six years, but whose run of success had fizzled. The loaded and highly entertaining 2019 Cyclones fielded several future NBA players, including freshmen Tyrese Haliburton and Talen Horton-Tucker. They peaked at 18–5 in early February and won the Big 12 title. But the group struggled with chemistry over the course of the season and ultimately bowed out in the first round of the NCAA tournament.
Iowa State went just 12–20 the following year despite a star turn from Haliburton, who battled an injured wrist and missed the final month of the season. After Haliburton’s departure for the draft, there was little left in the cupboard for the Cyclones, with nothing going right in the unfathomable two-win campaign. Prohm was let go on March 16, 2021, and Otzelberger was announced as his replacement two days later, arriving from UNLV via South Dakota State, and with two prior stints as an Iowa State assistant under his belt.
Otzelberger hit the transfer portal with plenty of playing time to offer and an opportunity to start from scratch in setting a tone for his program. Iowa State’s staff sought out players with minimal ego who they felt could handle increased opportunity and produce. “We wanted to make sure they knew what we were going to be about, they knew what they were signing up for, they knew what our identity would be,” he says. Their class of five transfers was led by two wings, Izaiah Brockington (Penn State) and Gabe Kalscheur (Minnesota), seniors who had experienced ups and downs at previous stops and were ready to take on heavy minutes and lead.
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The most important piece, however, was retaining top recruit Tyrese Hunter, a four-star point guard from Racine, Wis., who had been brought into the fold by Iowa State’s previous staff and former assistant James Kane. The Cyclones were the only high major team that aggressively recruited Hunter over the course of the pandemic, during which his St. Catherine’s high school team went 53–1 in his junior and senior years, and he committed in August 2020. Otzelberger, a Milwaukee native, knew the local scene well enough to know what his first priority had to be. When Prohm was fired, Hunter wanted to reopen his recruitment. Otzelberger and his staff led a frantic campaign to keep him in place, ensuring that the role and playing time would be there immediately. Hunter bought in, won Big 12 Freshman of the Year, and exploded for 23 points in the first-round win against LSU.
While not necessarily a winning recipe on paper—Iowa State was unanimously picked last in the Big 12—that perimeter trio led the Cyclones in scoring, creating passable pathways to staying afloat, Brockington as the main option, Hunter as the lead playmaker and Kalscheur as the third wheel.
“It’s a system of everyone getting a touch and everyone feeling it out, everyone kind of playing for each other,” Kalscheur explains. Otzelberger and his staff implemented a structured regimen for their players, who are regularly expected to arrive at 7 a.m. for breakfast and morning practice and end each day with an early-evening team meeting and meal. They ran early-morning conditioning sessions all summer and bonded quickly. Otzelberger preaches time management and having consistent work habits to fall back on through adversity. Through wins and losses, the schedule doesn’t change. “As they continued to build confidence in that process,” he says, “they started to believe we can win more games and we can win immediately.”
The merits of that secret sauce, of course, can be outwardly debated. Iowa State certainly benefited from a good draw, pulling two opponents in LSU and Wisconsin that also relied on defense and were never threats to run the Cyclones off the floor. LSU head coach Will Wade’s recent ouster left the Tigers mostly rudderless. Wisconsin guard Chucky Hepburn injured his ankle in the first half of Sunday’s game, which left the Badgers’ offense searching for answers that a worn-down Johnny Davis couldn’t provide. And things will certainly not get easier, with Miami on tap, then potentially a rematch with top-seed Kansas, which beat Iowa State twice.
The Cyclones will have to double down on their principles against Miami, which boasts one of the better offenses remaining in the tourney and relies on experienced guards in small-ball lineups. The two teams match up well on paper, but the Hurricanes play faster and shoot it better and will put pressure on Iowa State to seize tempo. The Cyclones will be underdogs again, but there’s a blueprint that works. And if it so happens to be function over form, so be it.
