Iowa State basketball, with a mostly unheralded roster, continues as a Big 12 contender

AMES – Bill Self sat deep inside Hilton Coliseum after his vaunted Kansas program had been bested there in back-to-back years for the first time in nearly a decade. He took that moment to reflect on what was unquestionably the most successful era in the home team’s history, and pointed out perhaps the current iteration’s biggest departure from those teams.

“When they had Nader and Naz and Georges and Monte and all those cats – that’s as good as our league’s had, including us,” the Jayhawks coach said Saturday. “I don’t think Iowa State’s personnel is like that (now).”

Iowa State basketball does not have the likes of Abdel Nader, Naz Mitrou-Long, Georges Niang or Monte Morris – NBA players, all – but the Cyclones, now in Year 3 of the coach T.J. Otzelberger era, share something with the teams of Iowa State’s recent golden past.

High-level success.

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The Cyclones have been to back-to-back NCAA Tournaments, appeared in a Sweet 16 and appear poised to make it three straight with a real chance at another second-weekend tournament showing. They also are now in real pursuit of something that, despite all their other achievements, eluded the best teams coaches Fred Hoiberg and Steve Prohm had in their tenures that featured seven NCAA Tournaments, four Big 12 Tournament titles and two Sweet 16s.

A Big 12 regular-season title.

The Cyclones will reach the midway point of the Big 12 schedule after a two-game road swing at Baylor (Saturday, 7 p.m.) and Texas (Tuesday, 7 p.m.), and they are now just a half-game out of first place, having won five of their last six.

Iowa State (16-4, 5-2) is doing it without the obvious NBA-caliber players that Hoiberg and Prohm so often deployed. Otzelberger not only has yet to have a player drafted into the NBA in his first two years, none of his Cyclones have so much as taken a dribble in an NBA game.

This year’s team does not look as though it’s composed much differently. Milan Momcilovic looks to have an NBA future, though it’s probably a year or more away. Beyond Momcilovic, there isn’t an obvious NBA player on the Cyclones’ roster. The one player who would have been the top candidate before the season, freshman and McDonald’s All-American Omaha Biliew, rarely even cracks the Iowa State rotation.

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The Cyclones instead largely play transfers who began their careers at community colleges, the Mountain West, the Ohio Valley and other basketball outposts.

Iowa State’s roster isn’t populated by slouches, certainly, but it is not one that would scream "success" off the paper.

So how is this team − or, more broadly, this program – doing it?

“We do a lot of hard things in the offseason,” Buffalo transfer Curtis Jones said Thursday. “When you go through hard things with a group of people, it brings you guys together.

“The games, obviously they’re hard, but they’re not as hard as the things we did in the offseason.”

There’s more to it that just that, obviously, and it starts with a defense that has ranked among the country’s elite over the past three seasons.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that Otzelberger used a defensive metaphor to describe the program’s overall process.

“We talked to our guys about regardless of outcome of the game, there’s times defensively you get the team to take the shot you want and it still goes in,” he said. “You can’t react to that shot because ultimately you did the job and believe if that team has to take that shot over and over, you’re going to be successful.

“We’ve just got to stay in the same process,” Otzelberger continued. “Keep our head down. Keep our focus on the task at hand, have a great practice the next day, prepare going into the game. You know when you’re in this league, you have to mentally prepare. Adversity is coming. You know adversity is coming. It’s coming on a possession, in a play, in a game, over a stretch of games. We’re mentally prepared knowing adversity is around the corner, and when it is, we’re going to embrace it and hit it head on.”

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That leads to a daily routine that looks much the same in June as it does in December or March.

“How we lead is through our actions, being the same every single day,” Otzelberger said. “What (players) see from (coaches) is the same every day. We coach them the same. We have the same process. We do everything the same.

“What our hope is by doing that they see how we’re going about it and they go about it the same way.”

That same way has produced mostly the same results now going on three seasons – plenty of wins.

“We try to keep our guys focused on what matters, what the main thing is,” Otzelberger said. “What you’re ranked doesn’t matter. What your record today is doesn’t matter. It’s an unbalanced conference schedule – that doesn’t matter.

“Ultimately, it’s about let’s have a great day today, let’s keep getting better and let’s see where this can take us.”

Travis Hines covers Iowa State University sports for the Des Moines Register and Ames Tribune. Contact him at thines@amestrib.com or  (515) 284-8000. Follow him on X at @TravisHines21.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Iowa State basketball climbs rankings, exceeding Big 12 expectations