No team in college basketball has had a better January than Iowa. The Hawkeyes have rolled to a 7-0 start in Big Ten play despite being saddled with close to the most difficult early-season conference slate imaginable.
Why are college basketball fans refusing to take Iowa seriously?
Fran McCaffery’s Hawkeyes are one of the sport’s elite teams according to every ranking system imaginable, and yet nobody seems willing to label Iowa as a national championship favorite. Here’s an attempt to explain why.
Jeffrey Becker-USA TODAY Sports
In the last four weeks, Fran McCaffery’s team has swept Michigan State and Purdue, two of the three Big Ten teams most fans assumed would definitely finish above Iowa at the start of league play. They hammered another likely tournament team in Michigan and then also won decisively against Nebraska and at Rutgers.
This run has left Iowa in the top five of both human polls, at No. 2 in Ken Pomeroy’s ratings and No. 5 in the Sagarin ratings. Despite all this, there are those in the college basketball milieu who will acknowledge the Hawkeyes as a team in the running for a No. 1 seed, but not as a legitimate threat to finish their season in the Final Four. In fact, those people would seem to outnumber the ones who believe Iowa has what it takes to make the April trip to Houston.
In a season where pretty much everyone agrees that we know so little, why do some people seem so sure that Iowa is a pretender?
Here’s an attempt to explain the phenomenon.
People think the Big Ten is overrated
It’s the most simple, but most obvious place to start. Why? Because people think every conference is overrated, but especially the Big Ten and the Big East this year.
Iowa thrashed Michigan State twice, but people have chalked it up to the Spartans being without Denzel Valentine in the first meeting and still readjusting to life with him back in the fold in the second. They did the same thing to Purdue, but people have chalked that up to the Boilermakers being fellow pretenders.
Although there are those who will likely never be swayed, I do think that winning at Maryland -- a team most believe is the most talented in the Big Ten -- Thursday night would do more for Iowa’s legitimacy campaign than any other victory it has garnered this season. If the Hawkeyes prevail in their only regular season meeting with the Terps, then they will almost certainly be 11-0 in league play heading into another showcase road game at Indiana on Feb. 11.
The exhibition loss
For a sport that gets more criticism for having a “meaningless regular season” than any other in America, there is a weird primacy effect that exists in college basketball. Results from early- or mid-November tend to stay lodged in the minds of casual fans of the sport, where they inexplicably remain up until the point when that mind fills out a 68-team bracket in early March.
For Iowa, this means that there are those who still remember the first headline this team made in 2015-16: a 76-74 exhibition game loss to Division-II Augustana on Nov. 6. Even though McCaffery said after the game that his team “needed this loss” to realize its weaknesses, most saw the defeat as justification that the Hawkeyes would finish in the bottom half of their conference.
The succeeding two-and-a-half months have proven the exhibition loss to be an anomaly (and a beneficial one for Iowa), but much like Syracuse’s loss to Le Moyne back in 2009, there are those who have had a hard time shaking it from their conscious. It’s time, people.
A lack of recognizable star power
Before the season, only one sports network included Iowa senior forward Jarrod Uthoff in its list of the best 100 players in college basketball (it was us ... it was this one). The climb up the national recognition hill is always going to be far more difficult to navigate for someone who wasn't even in the picture at the beginning of the journey. If Uthoff had entered the 2015-16 season with the same level of hype and expectation as, say, Kris Dunn or Buddy Hield, then he'd be hearing his name mentioned every single time there was a national Player of the Year discussion on ESPN, reddit, or a living room in South Dakota. As it is, non-diehard college hoops fans are just starting to figure out who he is and what team he plays for.
Uthoff enters Thursday night’s game at Maryland averaging 18.9 points, 6.2 rebounds and 3.0 blocks per game. He has scored in double figures in all 19 of Iowa’s games, and hit the 20-point mark in 10 of those tilts. Still, there are those who recognize his name only as the guy who made national headlines in 2012 when he attempted to transfer from Wisconsin and Bo Ryan hit him with a lengthy list of schools he was blocked from attending. That began a nasty appeals process, which included Uthoff ultimately picking Iowa (one of the blocked schools) and paying his own tuition while sitting out the 2012-13 season.
College basketball fans should know Uthoff for far more than that now. If they don’t, they’ll learn to over the course of the next two months.
Lack of program history
For all the unpredictable, March Madness-type branding that the sport receives, there's still this perception in college basketball that only a select group of programs are ever really true threats to win the sport's national championship.
In the two most recent seasons that best resemble the “it could be anyone’s year” climate currently dominating the sport, it wound up being a perennial powerhouse program that cut down the nets -- Connecticut as a No. 3 seed in 2011, and the Huskies again as a seven seed in 2014. Those tournaments only solidified this odd belief that certain programs, even if they play in power conferences, shouldn’t be taken seriously as legitimate threats to be the last team standing in April.
It’s a phenomenon that I think directly correlates to the lack of respect we’re seeing for Iowa right now. The Hawkeyes have never won a national championship. They haven’t made a regional final since 1987, and they haven’t been to a Final Four since 1980. According to college basketball logic, that means they shouldn’t be taken seriously in March until the day they bust brackets and prove everybody wrong.
McCaffery, Uthoff and company will have an opportunity to do just that in a very short period of time.
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