KFGO hosts Mike McFeely and Joel Heitkamp are in Seattle, Washington covering the NDSU Bison basketball team as they take on Gonazaga in the NCAA Tournament. Full coverage is available on Bison Central and the NDSU at the NCAA Tournament sections of kfgo.com.
SEATTLE (KFGO) -- Ben Jacobson, a Mayville, N.D., guy and part of that family's long basketball lineage, played college hoops at the University of North Dakota and began his coaching career as a graduate assistant at the same school under Rich Glas in 1994. He was promoted to assistant coach/recruiting coordinator in 1996 and remained in that position through the 1999-2000 season.
It was after that season when North Dakota State, UND's bitter rival to the south in Fargo, hired Greg McDermott to replace Ray Giacoletti. McDermott had been an assistant under Glas from 1989-94 before taking his first head coaching job at NCAA Division II Wayne (Neb.) State. McDermott was given much credit in Grand Forks for recruiting under Glas, and won 20-plus games four straight years in the previously dead basketball zone of Wayne.
McDermott was considered a rising star in the coaching ranks. There were those, including McDermott, who believed he should've been hired by the Bison instead of Giacoletti in the first place. His close ties to UND and Glas were seen as one reason why McDermott had a to wait for the Bison job.
McDermott reached out to Jacobson to join his staff in Fargo. Jacobson, seeing an opportunity, accepted. The former UND player and coach joined the Bison.
This sparked a degree of controversy in Grand Forks. Some UND coaches, most notably cranky women's basketball coach and noted NDSU hater Gene Roebuck, considered Jacobson a turncoat. He was referred by some in the Grand Forks media (if memory serves, Grand Forks Herald columnist Ryan Bakken) as "Benedict" Jacobson, a play on well-known traitor Benedict Arnold.
A columnist at The Forum newspaper in Fargo -- me -- wrote that the whole kerfuffle was foolish. Jacobson, I wrote, took a better opportunity for more money and better future prospects. I chided the Grand Forks media for being small-minded rubes in attacking a young coach for trying to advance himself.
Bakken responded by telling me it was like a coach from North Carolina taking a job at Duke. I laughed and said UND-NDSU in no way resembles anything having to do with North Carolina-Duke.
I recount this long tale from long ago to repeat a point I've made before: Jacobson made exactly the right decision.
This is evidenced by the fact Jacobson is in Seattle this week as the head coach at Northern Iowa of the Missouri Valley Conference. The Panthers will play Wyoming Friday in the first game of the day at Key Arena.
UNI is 30-3 and ranked 11th in the country. Jacobson's team is a favorite to advance in the tournament. It is a fifth seed.
Jacobson is in his ninth season as the head coach at UNI, after taking over for McDermott in 2006. McDermott ended up spending just one season in Fargo, before leaving to take the job at his alma mater in Cedar Falls. Jacobson followed and eventually was rewarded with a promotion when McDermott left UNI for Iowa State.
Jacobson is approaching 200 victories with the Panthers, making him the winningest coach in school history. His greatest claim to fame thus far is the 2010 NCAA tournament, when UNI advanced to the Sweet Sixteen after upsetting top-ranked Kansas.
UNI is in a different position this year as a favorite, as opposed to being the Little Engine That Could out of Iowa.
"From our guys' standpoint, this is the first time they've been to the NCAA tournament so these guys don't know any different," Jacobson said. "They haven't been in a situation where they have been a 9 seed or higher. So for them, they don't know any different. They have done a great job all year of approaching things in a businesslike manner and just kind of taking the next thing that's on the schedule for them."
UNI and Jacobson, like much of the Missouri Valley basketball conference, are pushing to shed the "mid-major" label and become a big-time program. Everybody wants to be the next Gonzaga, NDSU's opponent Friday night. Other Missouri Valley teams like Wichita State and McDermott's Creighton are already "high-mid-majors."
"People around the country understand the quality of play within our league," Jacobson said. "It motivates our own guys to want to get into that national spotlight, to want to get to rise up to that challenge and meet that challenge."
There is also this tidbit about Jacobson. Shortly after the 2010 NCAA tournament run, Jacobson signed a 10-year contract with UNI that guaranteed him $450,000 a year with annual raises of $25,000.
If nothing else, those numbers prove the young UND coach who defected to NDSU all those years ago made the correct decision.
(Mike McFeely is a talk-show host on 790 KFGO in Fargo-Moorhead. He can be heard 2-5 p.m. weekdays. Follow him on Twitter @MikeMcFeelyKFGO.)