Iowa is not about to let its dream season slip away

On Friday, Nov. 6, exactly one week before Iowa was to begin its 2015-16 college basketball season, the Hawkeyes played an exhibition game at Carver-Hawkeye Arena. It was against a Division II opponent, the type of game you expect the Big Ten school to win by 40.

Instead, they lost to Augustana College, 76-74 — the first time in 13 years Iowa had lost an exhibition game. Alarm bells sounded all around the state, worrying that the tide might have turned on a rising program that had just made back-to-back NCAA tournaments after missing The Big Dance for seven consecutive years.

This past Sunday, 79 days after the Augustana loss, the Iowa Hawkeyes handled a talented, ranked Purdue team at Carver-Hawkeye Arena. It was coach Fran McCaffery’s ninth straight win, including two over previously top-ranked Michigan State, and would earn the Big Ten-leading Hawkeyes the third spot in this week’s AP Poll.

The Hawkeyes had begun the season outside the top 25; now they have the program’s highest ranking since 1987.

They are, without a doubt, the most surprising team in college basketball.

But not all that surprising to McCaffery. The sixth-year head coach has built this once-foundering program up from the foundation on the backs of four-year players like Aaron White, who as a senior led last year’s team to third place in the Big Ten before being taken in the NBA draft’s second round, and Jarrod Uthoff, who this season is garnering serious attention as a national player of the year candidate.

It was the approach McCaffery knew he was going to take when he accepted this job: He’d build from the ground up, not on the backs of transfers. He’d take his lumps in the beginning, knowing it would be a sacrifice for better times down the road.

And so when McCaffery and assistant coach Sherman Dillard were sitting in McCaffery’s office Monday afternoon, watching tape of Maryland before Thursday’s big-time matchup in College Park, and another assistant knocked on the door to tell them about the newest AP Poll, McCaffery’s reaction was muted.

“We just said, ‘Great!’ — then we rolled the tape and kept going,” McCaffery told me this week.

I remember heading to Iowa City in October for one of the Hawkeyes’ first official practices of the season. I could lie and say I saw this coming. But if I’m being honest, what I saw were mixed results. That’s exactly what you would expect from a team that starts four seniors and one junior — then has a bench filled out by a sophomore and a ton of freshmen. For a team that plays McCaffery’s preferred up-and-down style, having a capable bench is important.

“We’re a team that needs the bench to come in and pick us up,” McCaffery said. He prefers to play nine- or 10-man rotations, giving his starters a breather, and you can’t lose ground every time you go to the bench.

“Early on I wasn’t sure if we had enough,” McCaffery said. “I knew we had five guys we could count on, but could we count on five through 10?”

But Iowa’s greatest strength is the experience of that starting lineup. Name another elite team that starts four seniors and one junior. I can’t think of one. It’s an inadvertent advantage non-blueblood schools have in the one-and-done age — because they are more focused on recruiting the guy who will develop over four or five years than recruiting the guy who is aiming for the NBA after a season or two.

But make no mistake: This team’s surprising consistency has been as much a result of that unheralded young bench as the experienced starting five. Uthoff has been phenomenal, senior point guard Mike Gesell has become one of the top playmakers in college basketball, junior Peter Jok has shown the ability to go off for 20-plus points on any given night, and senior Adam Woodbury has been the most intense 7-footer in the country. But the solid underclassmen have been this team’s glue. Guys like sophomore Dom Uhl, an athletic big man who is making 51.3 percent of his threes. And freshman Nicholas Baer, another strong perimeter shooter. And instant-energy freshman Ahmad Wagner.

Perhaps the most subtle but telling moment of Iowa’s season came when the Hawkeyes beat Michigan at home a couple weeks ago. At one point, McCaffery’s front line featured all underclassmen: Baer, Uhl and Wagner. And Iowa extended its lead by 10 points with those three on the floor. What appeared to be Iowa’s biggest question mark back in October has turned into its most surprising strength in January.

“I had no doubt that we had the talent to be where we’re at right now,” Gesell told me the other day. “I didn’t know exactly how it’d all work out with the old guys and the new guys, but I knew we had the talent. We just had to put it all together.”

One knock on McCaffery has been his team's late-game — or even late-season — collapses. It's a reputation that's stuck in this team’s mind throughout the year as motivation. The upperclassmen frequently remind themselves (and tell the youngsters) about two years ago, when a dominating February win over Michigan that had Iowa looking Final Four-capable was followed by a 2-7 finish to the season. They remind themselves of the game at Iowa State in December, where the Hawkeyes led by 20 points in the second half before suffering a soul-crushing loss.

“We remind ourselves of that game every time we have a lead at half,” said Gesell, the point guard whose improving court vision has him among the nation’s leaders in assists. “There are so many learning experiences. Our team does a tremendous job of taking low points of the season and learning from it. We never get too high. We never get too low.”

The Hawkeyes didn’t get too low on Nov. 6, when they lost to Augustana. After all, that wasn’t just any Division II team: That was a Division II team ranked No. 1 in the country and returning five starters; a game few coaches would schedule. Even though it didn’t count, the exhibition was an eye opener for this team, a reminder that you can’t take a game or even a possession for granted.

And these days, the Hawkeyes aren’t getting too high during a time when their No. 3 ranking has brought fan excitement, national recognition and dreams of winning the Big Ten and landing a one-seed in the NCAA tournament.

I asked McCaffery about all the recent hype around his program. He gave an answer that resonates on a team where an experienced starting five is keeping the excitable underclassmen on a level plane.

“For the time being,” he shrugged. “You never know. You've never arrived. And you can’t ever think that way.”

Follow Reid Forgrave on Twitter @reidforgrave or email him at ReidForgrave@gmail.com.