Get To Know Ben Jacobson, New Utah State MBB Head Coach

When the people of Iowa opened their March 26, 2006, issue of The Des Moines Register to section C, sports, they had a great deal of information to take in. In the left top corner, Kimmie Meissner was recognized for her World Figure Skating Championships title. Right next door were stories about LSU and UConn punching two tickets to the 2006 Final Four. Baseball reports filled the left margin. Iowa State head football coach Dan McCarney occupied the right side, detailing his hopes for the 2006 campaign that would ultimately be his last with the Cyclones.

Those were stories to be read later. The priority on the page, laid out front and center in a perfectly of-the-time graphic, was Greg McDermott. Writers Rick Brown, Randy Peterson and Tim Witosky had spent much of the previous week carefully reconstructing the timeline of McDermott's decision to leave Northern Iowa for Iowa State after three NCAA tournament berths in a row.

It all happened, as the story's title would suggest, in the span of about 96 hours. Iowa State fired head coach Wayne Morgan on March 16. McDermott and Iowa State athletic director Jamie Pollard first made contact on the evening of March 18, setting up an interview in Iowa City for the following afternoon. On March 20, after discussing it with his family, McDermott called Pollard and told him he would accept the job. They began contract negotiations that night and went final before midnight, just in time for McDermott to call Northern Iowa athletic director Rick Hartzell with the news.

"I knew it was coming, but I really didn't want it to come," Hartzell said.

Ben Jacobson, McDermott's top assistant, was in a familiar place when the clock struck 12 on March 20. The Mayville, North Dakota native and former North Dakota Mr. Basketball pick had spent more than his fair share of nights in spots just like this one. He was a four-year letterman, two-year starter and eventually a seven-year assistant for head coach Rich Glas at North Dakota, scouting hundreds of junior college tournaments just like the one he found himself at in Hutchinson, Kansas on this night.

Though he would leave the nest ahead of the 2000-01 season, taking an assistant role at North Dakota State, he wasn't straying far from home. In fact, he was reconnecting with McDermott, a former Glas assistant himself and one of Jacobson's coaches at UND. He had just been hired as the NDSU head man after six years at Wayne State, and he wanted Jacobson to join him.

After one year in Fargo, the two moved south to Cedar Falls, Iowa, where McDermott would replace Sam Weaver after he logged three losing seasons as Northern Iowa's head coach. Deploying a recruiting strategy built around local prospects and events much like this one in Hutchinson, McDermott, Jacobson and Co. had done what Weaver, Eldon Miller and Jim Berry could not, transforming UNI into a consistent winner at the DI level. McDermott went 90-63 on the job with three NCAA tournament appearances and three 20-win seasons. Replacing him would be an enormous task.

About two minutes after learning that the task would fall to him, Hartzell called up Jacobson, who was lying in bed while fellow assistant Jeff Rutter took the couch. He asked Jacobson if he would be following McDermott to Ames, and if he'd like to chat about the new opening at Northern Iowa. He would. Jacobson took down notes on a legal pad, wrote out his top priority (returning players and recruiting), and waited out a snow storm that would keep him in Hutchinson through the night.

The following morning, Jacobson and Rutter set out for Cedar Falls, with stops in Ames (to drop Rutter off, as he'd be joining McDermott at ISU), Bondurant and Bellevue (for recruiting) baked in. Jacobson got to bed at about 3:30 a.m., knocked out four hours before his sons Hunter (then two years old) and Tanner (then six months old) woke him up. Fewer than four hours after that, he stepped to the podium as Northern Iowa's new head basketball coach.

At the press conference, Jacobson's elder son took the chance to introduce himself, breaking a brief silence with a quick, 'Hi, dad.' The newly minted head coach passed his first test with a smile and a, 'Hi, bud' back at him. At the time, it was the greatest day of his professional career, and almost certainly one of the busiest. He was a first-time program leader at 35 years old, the ink still drying on a five-year contract worth $150,000 annually. Fresh in his mind was the advice McDermott had given him only a few months before.

"He said that if I had a chance to become the coach at Northern Iowa, whether that was tomorrow or 10 years from now, I had to do it," Jacobson said at the time. "His opinion is gold to me."

Later that day, Jacobson would hit the road again, heading north to Wisconsin where he would visit with forward Adam Koch, one of four prep signees in Northern Iowa's recruiting class. He had already met with two others and chatted with a third, and intended to keep all four in the fold, along with three incumbent starters from the 2005-06 squad.

That group would become the core of Jacobson's first push at the helm for Northern Iowa. Veterans led the way for an 18-13 debut in 2006-07, while a combination of senior holdovers and fast-improving sophomores Jordan Eglseder and Koch registered an 18-14 mark in 2007-08. Almost 20 years later, Jacobson still remembers a story from a Springfield newspaper written ahead of his third season on the job, which wondered aloud if the Panthers had plateaued.

They had not. With 2006 signees Kwadzo Ahelegbe, Eglseder and Koch leading the way, accompanied by newly added JUCO guard Ali Farokhmanesh and freshman Johnny Moran, Northern Iowa rattled off a 23-11 record in 2008-09, winning the MVC regular season crown (14-4 in the league) and beating Illinois State in overtime to secure the tournament title and an NCAA berth. The Panthers fell in the first round to fifth-seeded Purdue, but they'd be back.

Riding that same core group and a ferocious defense, second nationally in scoring allowed per game, Northern Iowa enjoyed the greatest season in program history in 2009-10. It lost one non-conference game, against DePaul, and tore through the Missouri Valley with a 15-3 record, three games clear of the next team in the final standings. The Panthers added three more wins in the conference tournament, all by at least 15 points, and earned a No. 9 seed in the NCAA tournament. If you know your college basketball history, you know what happened next.

First, Northern Iowa held off a late push from eighth-seeded UNLV, sealing a 69-66 victory with a Farokhmanesh three-pointer as the game entered its final 10 seconds. Then, Jacobson and Co. staged one of the greatest upsets in tournament history against top-seeded Kansas, filled to the brim with future NBA players. Northern Iowa led for nearly the entire game, its dominant defense stifling Bill Self's Jayhawks before Farokhmanesh knocked down one of the tournament's most famous shots to secure the 69-67 stunner. The Panthers bowed out a week later against Michigan State, 59-52, ending the year with a program record of 30 wins to only five losses.

"Fans are fans, and they're crazy if they believe the ceiling has been met," Jacobson said. "If I believed that, it was after my second year. We won 18 games our first year and 18 games our second year, we're going into our third year and there was an article that fall after 18 wins and 18 wins. I got it in 2006, this would have been the fall of 2009, the reporter from the newspaper in Springfield wrote an article talking about the teams, and his comment about Northern Iowa was, 'It looks like they have plateaued.'

"That was in 2009. As you can tell, I've gotten over it. You know what we did next? We won the regular season and conference tournaments, we went to the NCAA tournament and Purdue beat us by five. The next year, we came back and won the regular season and conference tournament and won both NCAA tournament games and played in the Sweet 16. We won 20 games in each of the years after that until we got to (Seth Tuttle's) group and then we went to the tournament again with 31 wins. Do you want me to keep going?"

Across the next decade and a half, Jacobson did his work in developmental waves. Operating without elite resources – Northern Iowa does not have a dedicated basketball practice facility, despite repeated fundraising efforts – and in difficult recruiting terrain, the Panthers made their name doing more with less. They were almost always solid during his two decades at the helm, suffering only four losing seasons while churning out 11 20-win campaigns, four MVC regular season titles, five tournament championships and five NCAA tournament berths, which likely would have been six if not for COVID-19.

When Jacobson found young cores to build around, though, he did his best work. Five years after the Sweet 16 run, split by three 20-win seasons (two CIT appearances, one NIT appearance) and a 16-15 year in 2013-14, he ramped back up for 2014-15. The Panthers had three great seniors in Nate Buss, Deon Mitchell and Seth Tuttle, three more strong juniors in Matt Bohannon, Paul Jesperson and Wes Washpun, and a clear path to another excellent showing. They took advantage, going 11-1 in non-league games including a neutral site win over Iowa, 16-2 in the MVC, and 3-0 in the conference tournament to earn the trophy and an NCAA bid as a No. 5 seed.

Their run came to an end in the second round against fourth-seeded Louisville, but they crushed Wyoming in the first round and wasted no time returning to the dance as a 23-13 No. 11 seed and MVC champions a year later. They knocked off sixth-seeded Texas in the first round and nearly returned to the Sweet 16, before Texas A&M used a frantic comeback to survive a second-round clash.

That core proved very difficult to replace. Northern Iowa struggled to a 14-16 record in 2016-17, Jacobson's first losing season on the job, and didn't fare much better in 2017-18 (16-17) or 2018-19 (16-18). The longtime head coach stuck to it, though, and built a terrific squad in 2019-20 around sophomores AJ Green and Austin Phyfe, junior Trae Berhow and seniors Isaiah Brown and Spencer Haldeman. His group went 25-5 in the regular season to earn the regular season MVC title and a top 50 finish in the KenPom rankings, but could go no further. Northern Iowa lost to Drake in the MVC tournament, only a few days before the NCAA tournament was officially canceled.

The ending stung. Northern Iowa fell to 10-15 in 2020-21, rebounded to 20-12 in 2021-22, and promptly suffered its first encounter with college basketball's new era. That 2021-22 bunch had broken through a year earlier than expected, and the Panthers were not prepared to fend off the scavengers circling their roster. Standout forward Noah Carter landed at Missouri; Green entered the portal and decided to go pro; Phyfe graduated, and Northern Iowa returned only 19.1 percent of its minutes with returning starter Nate Heise sidelined by injury just two games into the season. Suddenly one of the least experienced teams in the sport, the Panthers plummeted to 14-18, their ability to compete with the transfer portal and NIL an open question.

Over the past three seasons, his final run at the helm in Cedar Falls, Jacobson answered that question. Despite a mounting resource gap, he retained a good chunk of the 2022-23 roster and churned out a 19-14 record, immediately surpassed by another solid offseason of retention and a 20-13 mark (14-6 in the MVC) capped by an NIT berth.

With 64.7 percent of the 2024-25 minutes returning, third in the nation, Jacobson pulled one last rabbit from his hat this past season. Relying on fourth-year starting point guard Trey Campbell, junior small forward and former Virginia transfer Leon Bond III, second-year center Will Hornseth, senior forward Ben Schwieger (formerly of Loyola Chicago), senior guard Max Weisbrod (formerly of Northern Michigan) and a pair of newcomers in NC State forward Ismael Diouf and Concordia (NE) forward Tristan Smith, Northern Iowa ended the regular season at 19-12 (11-9). It had struggled without Smith, who missed almost all of January with an injury, but went 17-6 when he was healthy and entered the MVC tournament as a tremendously dangerous No. 6 seed.

The Panthers then delivered what Jacobson would later describe as four of the best days of his tenure. They beat Evansville by nine in the opening round, throttled third-seeded Illinois State 74-52, escaped second-seeded Bradley 73-69, and toppled Illinois Chicago in the title game, 84-69. Though Northern Iowa's season ended at the hands of an underseeded St. John's side in the opening round of the NCAA tournament, getting there at all was a major achievement. Jacobson's developmental program could still thrive in the new era, even with an expanded recruiting footprint to include transfers.

"It's been so much fun for me because it's been across the board," Jacobson said. "If you look at our programs and who and why we're recruiting in men's basketball, it's very similar to who and why in volleyball, women's basketball, softball and across the board. These are the young people who have been a part of all our teams, and because of that, you have a lot of success. Man oh man am I proud of what we've accomplished. It won't be the last time you hear me talk about this team or this place. Those opportunities to be a championship team, to play in the NCAA tournament and go down that road, the highest levels of competition we've been a part of, I'm proud of that. But, not nearly as proud as I am of who we are and how we went about it. I'm way more proud of that, and that's a high bar."

When the 55-year-old head coach took to the podium for the final time at Northern Iowa on Monday morning, he was nervous – perhaps as nervous as he had been in almost two decades since his introduction in 2006. Coaches rarely hold press conferences like this one, but news broke that Jacobson would be leaving the program he built for Utah State only a few hours earlier, and he intended to say goodbye the right way. With 397 wins to 259 losses, he's Northern Iowa's winningest coach twice over, surpassing O.M. Nordly (166) in 2014 and adding to his lead for another 12 years.

So, why now? Plenty of bigger programs had come calling on the coach during his 20 years at the helm, and he had turned them all down without regret. What set this one apart? The question was inevitable, and Jacobson was ready for it. First, there was the opportunity itself.

"Utah State is a unique place," Jacobson said. "They've already demonstrated that for years, not just what has happened in the last five or six years. You can go back for a long time. They've demonstrated that. It's a unique place from a basketball program standpoint, that excites me, and the new Pac-12 excites me. My family is in a good spot, a different spot timing-wise, and these guys are doing great."

More important to Jacobson and his wife, Dawn, is that timing. Little Hunter Jacobson isn't so little anymore. He's 22, and has spent the last four seasons in his dad's program with one year of eligibility remaining. Tanner is 20, and will graduate from Nebraska in 2028. Jacobson's young family isn't so young anymore. Moving won't put the boys in a new school or separate them from their friends. For Jacobson the man, the time was right.

"I'm 55 years old and I love doing it as much today as I always have, so it isn't about getting older and what that means," Jacobson said. "I feel great about that. When I talk timing, it's about Dawn and I being in a different place. Hunter is 22 years old, Tanner is 20 years old, and that's very different from five, 10, 15 years ago when some of these opportunities came our way. That piece of it has always been at the forefront for Dawn and me, and we're in a different place now in terms of the timing with those things.

"They hit at exactly the right time for me. As a head coach who has been here for 25 years and had different opportunities, I've never once kicked myself for saying no to one of them and coming back here, not one time. The timing is what made it right. Utah State is a special place, and man there are some possibilities. I can't wait for that to get started, right now and really tomorrow morning with the press conference. Dawn feels great about it, I feel really good about it, and Hunter and Tanner are in a really good place."

And for Jacobson the coach, there wasn't much more to do in Cedar Falls that he hadn't already done. This year's team will graduate five senior contributors, four of them starters. Tuttle, the former standout forward, has been an assistant under Jacobson for eight years and will contend for the chance to succeed him. He's secure in his legacy at Northern Iowa. When he thought about his family, both immediate and extended to include his coaches and players, he felt no reason to worry about them. After 20 years at the helm and 25 with the program, it's the right moment to try something new.

"You certainly don't put one word on it," Jacobson said. "The amount of fun that we have had doing this here, the moments and the memories that we get to take with us… I told the team this morning, something that I'm tremendously proud of is that those things don't go away and they don't change. Those are ours. It's something that in a bit of a strange way helped me make the decision.

"The team that's sitting here right now, what we did over the last two years helped me think about this in a little clearer way. Being able to do it at a high level with really good dudes, guys who care about each other and who care about what we're doing, their fellow students and their community. I don't know that I could put it into one word, and certainly not into one press conference, just how much this place means to mean and to Dawn and our family."

The sense of confidence didn't make those difficult conversations easier, but it made them worthwhile. Jacobson met with his younger players at 9 o'clock, telling them to be patient and give athletic director Megan Franklin a chance to make her hire. He met with his older players at 10. It still felt like the right decision.

"It was extremely difficult for all of the best reasons," Jacobson concluded. "The relationship that we have with each other and the trust that was built among this group, player to player, player to assistant coach and player to head coach, the whole thing. The amount of trust and care over the last two years was something that I hope everybody who does this gets to experience, that level of camaraderie that we had over the last two years. It's the hardest part of it, but it's also the best part of it. I don't have to worry about these guys. They're good dudes, they really care about each other and they care about the right things."

Finally, at 11:30, Jacobson held court with local media in the McLeod Center for the last time – only a three-minute walk from the UNI Dome where he was introduced two decades ago. The building, opened in November of 2006, has only known one men's basketball coach. He left it far better than he found it. Now, he holds the keys to the Dee Glen Smith Spectrum and the responsibility to protect it.

"I went through it with the guys this morning," Jacobson said. "It's the timing of it and the unique opportunity at Utah State. When I say that, from a job standpoint, it's just the possibilities moving into the new Pac-12 which will include Gonzaga and a number of teams from the Mountain West and Washington State, Oregon State and Texas State.

"That opportunity professionally and competitively, and the people I spent some time with over the last four or five days, those two things have to be in a really good place, and they are. That excites me on that side. There are some serious opportunities and possibilities because of where the floor is and what they've already done in men's basketball and within their athletic department. I feel great about that, I'm super excited about it."