Hlas: UNI Panthers are shining in the shadows

Here's what makes Northern Iowa one of the great national basketball stories going right now:

You would never think the team with the third-most fans and the third-most attention in a state the size of Iowa's could ever rise to 11th in the national polls in mid-February.

UNI is ahead of basketball brand-names like Louisville and North Carolina, ahead of every Big Ten team but one, ahead of every Big 12 team but one.

You look at UNI's roster and see some players who were recruited to major programs and a couple (Wes Washpun, Paul Jesperson) who started their careers in the SEC and ACC. But none made huge headlines when they cast their lot with Ben Jacobson's program.

Of course, neither were Adam Koch and Kwadzo Ahelegbe and Ali Farokhmanesh. They and their teammates merely produced the state's best basketball moment of this millennium five years ago when they took down Kansas in the NCAA tournament.

You hear senior power forward Seth Tuttle will probably turn up on a second-team All-America this or third-team All-America that, and you realize Tuttle is from an Iowa small town called Sheffield, and went to a high school called West Fork. He chose UNI over Colorado State. Then he went to work.

On Monday, Tuttle was named Missouri Valley Conference Player of the Week for the seventh time in his career.

The fact four players in the 9-man rotation of a No. 11 team are from Cedar Rapids-Marion and Coralville-North Liberty would be trumpeted loudly in the Corridor were those players Iowa Hawkeyes. But I suspect Wes Washpun, Jeremy Morgan, Matt Bohannon and Wyatt Lohaus can go out to eat without getting hounded for autographs and snapshots when they're back in their hometowns.

In this age of everyone knowing everything about everybody, you've had to go to your computer to watch many of UNI's games as they happened because they weren't televised. In this time of prominent college players having thousands of Twitter and Instagram followers, the nation's No. 11 team is 24-2 in near-anonymity.

Which makes this story all the better.

Hype is being undercut by performance. Style plays second-fiddle to substance, not that the Panthers don't have plenty of both. They have won their last 13 games. Starting with their 70-54 pasting of fellow ranked Missouri Valley Conference team Wichita State, they've won five straight by double-digits.

They aren't demanding respect or looking for perceived slights by ESPN talking heads. They just play.

Faced with a road game against Valley bottom-feeder Missouri State Sunday, UNI did what good teams are supposed to do. It jumped on Missouri State right away and didn't let up until victory was well in hand.

Now, the narrative can change in one night. If the Panthers go to Chicago Wednesday and get beaten by Loyola, non-UNI fans will smugly say 'Overrated,” and forget about them.

And should the Panthers lose their first-round NCAA game, many will quickly forget the regular-season heights they have scaled.

But what good is that proverbial journey everyone always talks about if you can't enjoy it as it progresses? A team that has been so consistently sharp over 26 games is a rare bird that doesn't come this state's way very often.

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