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Nothing was 50/50 about loose balls the way Iowa State hungrily played vs. Kansas
No. 2 Cyclones challenged virtually everything and sent ninth-ranked Jayhawks out of Hilton Coliseum with a 74-57 loss
Jan. 15, 2025 10:30 pm, Updated: Jan. 16, 2025 8:20 am
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AMES — Kansas 7-foot-2 center Hunter Dickinson: Big 12 preseason Player of the Year. A two-time second-team All-America.
Iowa State 6-foot-4 guard Curtis Jones: Big 12 preseason nothing. He wasn’t on ESPN’s preseason list of the nation’s top 100 players. Dickinson was No. 4.
Wednesday night, with 8:35 left in No. 2 Iowa State’s 74-57 win over No. 9 Kansas in Hilton Coliseum, Jones ignored his 10-inch height disadvantage and blocked a Dickinson shot. Cyclone forward Brandton Chatfield grabbed the rebound.
“I don’t think he saw me,” Jones said with a laugh. “I just kind of snuck up on him and just jumped up when he was shooting and blocked it. It was really simple.”
It was an exclamation point defensive moment for the Cyclones in a game with so many others. The Cyclones had 11 steals and forced 17 turnovers. They had 10 more rebounds than the Jayhawks. They held Kansas to 41 percent shooting.
They challenged almost everything, their calling card.
“Really, what makes them who they are?” Kansas Coach Bill Self said in his postgame news conference. “I’ll bet you they get 75 percent of the 50/50 balls. If there’s a ball there, they seem to get it.
“I thought in the first half there were probably five or six balls on an offensive rebound or something that they got that could have been our ball. We tried, but there’s a difference between trying hard and actually competing.”
Oh, Dickinson scored six points. Jones tallied 25.
“They had a player play like a first-team All-American,” Self said. “He’s terrific.”
Iowa State Coach T.J. Otzelberger screwed things up, He put Jones in his starting lineup Wednesday. The senior was on his way to being the Big 12’s Sixth Man of the Year, which is what you are when you come off the bench to lead the nation’s No. 2 team in scoring.
Iowa State's Curtis Jones gets one of his team's 11 steals in the Cyclones' 74-59 men's basketball win over Kansas Wednesday at Hilton Coliseum in Ames. (Savannah Blake/The Gazette)
If Jones keeps starting, the league will just have to give him some other honor. Like first-team All-Big 12, since he’s averaging 24.7 points over the last three games.
Cyclone forward Dishon Jackson screwed things up. He had started every game this season, but missed a mandatory film session and was punished by being pulled from the starting five in place of Brandton Chatfield. (Jones replaced forward Milan Momcilovic, who suffered a hand injury in practice and is expected to be out at least four weeks.)
“The standard is high,” Otzelberger said. “We expect everybody is going to fulfill that standard. At the same time, Dishon, once he made that choice and that decision, at that point it was out of his hands. Now he had to respond to it in a positive way.”
A more positive response, you’ll seldom see. Jackson played with fire and matched his season-high of 17 points. He conceded nothing against Dickinson in the paint. At one point, Jackson got two thumbs up from Otzelberger when the coach subbed him out of the game.
“It looked like to me tonight,” Self said, “that one guy really enjoyed starting and another guy was pissed off because he didn’t, and they both played great.”
Kansas-Iowa State games are main events here every year. Usually, it’s because the Jayhawks are Goliath and the Cyclones are like all other Big 12 teams and are trying to topple the giant.
Kansas is very good, mind you. It came in here with a three-game winning streak, dismantling Big 12 foes by an average of 28 points and allowing just 47.7 points in that stretch. It wasn’t Iowa State-good this night, however.
Asked what impressed him most about the Cyclones going from a two-win team the season before Otzelberger became its head coach to the No. 2 team in the country, Self said “The bottom line is the pieces fit.
“The other thing is they are very well-drilled and they’re very good in situation basketball. … They’re a very smart basketball team.
“They’re old, too, but I would say talent-evaluation, putting the team together, and then getting them to play as hungry as they do.”
The sixth-man thing? It’s of little consequence to Jones. He played a total of 67 minutes in the previous two games as a so-called substitute.
“I just want to play a lot of minutes and win games,” he said.
Making 5 of 6 3-pointers against a Top Ten team and blocking a 7-2 All-America’s shot? That’s First-Man stuff for a first-place club.
Things didn't go Kansas Coach Bill Self's way Wednesday. His Jayhawks lost at Iowa State, 74-57. (Savannah Blake/The Gazette)
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