The Last of the Bohannons emerging at Iowa

IOWA CITY — He's the final brother in a family that's seen tremendous NCAA success. Chapter 2 looks at how his family sees his place at Iowa and their place rooting for the Hawkeyes.

Chapter 3 highlights what Jordan has done in his short time already, and what he could do given what he's learned from Jason, Zach and Matt.

Sometimes Twitter can be funny — even when opposing fanbases are tweeting about their rival teams during a game.

During Thursday night's Cy-Hawk game at Carver-Hawkeye Arena, Twitter user @austinnarber tweeted, 'Bohannons multiply like Plumlees' — the Plumlees being brothers Miles, Mason and Marshall, who played at Duke from 2008-16.

Give or take a few minutes, the tweet came around the time Jordan Bohannon — the last of four Bohannon brothers to play college hoops — sank his first 3-pointer of the night for Iowa. He was en route to eight points, five rebounds and four assists in the Hawkeyes' 78-64 win against No. 25 Iowa State.

What made the tweet even more apropos for the evening was Bohannon's parents, Gordy and Brenda, and brothers Jason, Zach and Matt all were in the seats at Carver. The whole Bohannon troupe got a kick out of the tweet, too.

'The Plumlees are a pretty darn good family, so I have to take it as a compliment,' Jordan said after the game.

'I think so, yeah, that's a compliment,' Matt said. 'We're running short. We've only got a couple more years.'

Life is a little different for the Bohannon family now. Jason and Zach have started careers and families in Cedar Rapids, while Matt is getting his graduate degree at Northern Iowa. For so long, it was Jordan who sat in the stands, first at Linn-Mar, then crisscrossing Big Ten and Missouri Valley Conference territory to watch his brothers play some of the best teams in the country. At the peak of all four boys playing, Gordy said he and Brenda would make 8-10 games a week sometimes.

Now, though, they all get to come together at once — though Matt joked that Jason didn't get to sit with the family and had to sit with a group of friends because their family is too big for the NCAA allotment of four tickets for players.

It's bizarre for Jordan, in a way, to have them all there.

'My entire life I've been thrown in the back of a car, traveling around the country watching them play,' Jordan said. 'All those times when I was younger have really helped me, growing up and realizing how I got here and who I am.'

For his family, returning to their Hawkeye roots has been easier than you might expect. Jason and Zach played at Carver four times and against the Hawkeyes overall nine times while playing for Wisconsin. Matt faced Iowa twice while at UNI, both times at Wells Fargo Arena in what was then called the Big Four Classic.

They came from black and gold country, though. All four Bohannon boys were born at Mercy Hospital in Iowa City. Gordy led the 1981 Iowa football team to the Rose Bowl. They grew up with Hawkeye football season tickets and attended more than a few games as fans during the Tom Davis and Steve Alford eras.

GALLERY: See photos from all four Bohannon brothers' years playing hoops at Linn-Mar, Wisconsin, UNI and Iowa

With Iowa's next game being against UNI, Matt is the first to have his family and alma mater loyalties tested, with Wisconsin coming in March. Jason said they haven't had a discussion about going to the Kohl Center yet. He said he wants to let Jordan focus on his next opponent, but that when the time comes, 'I don't think it'll be different than any other arena for him. He's just got to be ready to play and treat it like it's his home arena. Every single arena he goes to, he has to do that.'

Matt did color commentary Wednesday for a Panther Sports Network/CSN-Chicago broadcast of the Panthers' game against South Dakota State, and doubled down Thursday night, saying loyalty has to lie with family first. Zach echoed that as well, saying it's a special to watch your brother's dream come true.

READ: Matt Bohannon left his mark on UNI

It's easy to put the black and gold colors back on, they said, when it's your brother out there. It's probably nicest for their parents, though, being able to cheer for their school and their son simultaneously, with Gordy joking, 'Jordan's my favorite kid now, that's what they all think now,' and then more seriously adding, 'It's the way it's supposed to be, I think. Jordan said from Day 1, even when his brothers were at Wisconsin, his dream school was Iowa.'

'Makes me a little nervous, to be honest, just sitting here and not being able to make the plays out there on the floor and being out there myself,' Matt said. 'It's just a different perspective. I'm really excited to watch him out here and seeing how proud my family is of him — especially my parents seeing him in black and gold; seeing how comfortable he is and how fun he is to watch.'

Jordan so far has lived up to early expectations set for him by outsiders, averaging 8.4 points and a team-leading 4.7 assists through his first 10 games — the last four of which have been starts.

Iowa Coach Fran McCaffery has said on multiple occasions he's impressed with how Jordan is able to wipe a bad play from his memory very quickly and not let it turn into another.

Jordan gave the credit for that to his brothers. Matt and Zach laughed in a knowing way while waiting for their youngest brother to exit postgame media and join them for the trip home. They've all had many discussions about what to follow and not to follow from the elder three's careers.

Gordy said he's "rebounded tens of thousands; probably hundreds of thousands of shots," and said they're all different shooters. When pressed though, Gordy said "I would probably have to say Jordan," is the best shooter "because he's playing right now and we're watching him." He then joked that comment will probably spark a "family feud."

'I really think he's learned to take a little bit from each of us — learn from our strengths, learn from what we were bad at and build upon those,' Zach said. 'He is fearless and that fearlessness leads to him taking the next big shot. He knows if he misses one, he's a 50 percent shooter and he'll make the next one. That's the mindset you've got to have. He learned that, especially from Matt and Jason — maybe not me.'

Read more: Iowa's youth emerged in win against Iowa State

When Jordan's career is done and the Bohannons are gone from college hoops, the brothers will have played — barring injury for Jordan — somewhere around 475 college basketball games and likely have scored somewhere around 3,000 points. That's a lot of high quality basketball from one house in Marion.

What his brothers left at Wisconsin and UNI is set. What Jordan will leave at Iowa has a long way to go to be determined.

But when those couple years Matt mentioned are finished, maybe it's not the Plumlees that the Bohannons should be compared to. Zach mentioned a family a little closer to home than North Carolina — and maybe came up with a dynamite idea.

'I guess the best comparison I've got is in the state of Iowa. Everyone asks who the better basketball family is: the Korvers or the Bohannons, having four boys play Division I basketball,' Zach said. 'I guess the Korvers have the upper hand because the oldest one is an NBA player. I don't know. It's a nice debate. It would make a nice charity game in a few years. That would be fun.'

Jason, Zach, Matt and Jordan Bohannon vs. Pella natives Kyle, Klayton, Kaleb and Kirk Korver?

Someone set that up for summer 2020.

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