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I was wearing my trusty white "IOWA STATE" long-sleeve t-shirt.
It wasn't an easy job. But somebody had to be on that wall for the rest of us.
Though those days have come to a close for me. Alas.
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Is his name Conrad or Conard? Mixing the A/R up once with a typo would be understandable, but 3 times in one post? Is your phone auto-correcting to 'Conard' for some reason? lol
It was said that the greatest ISU basketball team ever (99-00)'s practices were harder than their games and having that 'pest' around may give that result.
We had a debate about the worst team in school history (or at least if the 2-22 Prohm team was the worst team in school history) in another thread. Why not use the same data (the Simple Rating System, or SRS, as produced by Basketball Reference) to examine the best team in school history then?
I know nearly all of you will reject this, but it seems the system likes the 2016-17 Prohm team (the one that ended with the defeat to Purdue in Milwaukee) more than the Fizer/Tinsley team.
1.) Morris/Mitrou-Long/Thomas/Burton "Four Horsemen" with freshman Solo
2.) Fizer/Tinsley year that lost to Michigan State in Auburn Hills
3.) Thigpen and Bayless' senior year with sophomore Hoiberg lost to UCLA in opening round
4.) Kane/Ejim/Niang year with the broken foot and loss to eventual champion UConn
5.) Shayok year with freshman Haliburton and Horton-Tucker that lost to Ohio State in Tulsa
6.) BDJ year with an up-and-down Big 12 season before the upset by UAB
7.) Niang's senior year/Prohm's first year with the loss to Virginia in Chicago
8.) Floyd's first year, Hoiberg's senior year, beat Florida but lost to UNC in the tournament
9.) the "year without Fizer" with a second Big 12 title but eventual upset to Hampton
10.) last year, the one with Lipsey/Kalscheur/Holmes and the eventual loss to Pitt
I do think this goes to show a few key takeaways, though...
1.) The past ~15 years truly have been a golden age for Iowa State basketball
2.) The Big 12 has been absolutely brutal over the same stretch given the SOS it presents
3.) Even some of the better Iowa State teams in history barely managed to go 9-9 in the supercharged Big 12 when every game is just an absolute battle from tip to buzzer
4.) Most of the best teams in school history still bowed out in the first weekend of the tournament
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I guess when I think of it, the roster overall and ability to really defend come into play.
I think 99-00 had the strongest ratings on both the offensive and defensive sides in relation to one another, which I believe typically coincides with teams that make tourney runs (with obvious outliers/nothing guaranteed).
But I don't know if things like efficiencies are compiled differently now than 25 years ago.
AND that 16-17 team defended pretty well toward the end of that season and really played about the best overall basketball imo at ISU since perhaps the two regular season conference champion teams. Their depth and playing to Purdue's game as opposed to creating the problem were their downfall.
Anything that doesn't have Fog and Hilton top 2 is dumb.
Iowa State is gonna be the team that other Big 12 teams least want to face. Not necessarily because we're the best team, but because we're the toughest and most physical team.
Tech fan so I see where he put TT above Hilton but he is wrong putting KSU over Hilton. I really can't argue with the Phog being #1.
That 99-00 team let their foot off the gas twice, against abysmal Drake and CU teams, and I’m sure that hurts the SRS. I tend to scoff at the “eye test” vs analytics, but in a meaningful game, I would rather have the 99-00 team every single time.
I was 12-13 at the time and finding the Cyclones on TV for every game in Boone wasn't as easy as it was now, so I probably do not have the game-by-game memory of things that you might.
That being said... the counterargument is "you are what your record says you are." A team that isn't focused or mentally tough enough that it needs to "take its foot off the gas" should be docked. If the squad won those games, they're probably a #1 seed and avoid the whole tomfoolery with having to play #1 seed and #1 overall Michigan State in Auburn Hills and instead get them in more neutral Indianapolis.
I could spin it even worse than that -- if a team is capable of having a "bad night" then they aren't quite as elite as we think they are. Good teams find ways to win even when they're having an off night.
It is an academic point, of course. The two-best Cyclone teams I have detailed living memory of were the Ejim/Kane/Niang team and then the one with all the guards during Monté's senior season. It would have been interesting to see those more powerful offensive teams (especially the second one with its incredible amount of shooters) go up against the more defense-oriented and pound the paint Fizer team.
Do we have a transfer from WVU on the MBB or FB team? Ran across a very tall, exceptionally buff college-aged kid with a WVU Athletics t-shirt shopping at the Ames HyVee. Didn't stop to talk to him, but he looked like he might be on one team or the other...
Jefferson Adam maybe? I believe his final two college choices were us and wv. Prolly doesn’t have a lot of clothes and received free gear from them on his recruitment. I could be completely wrong but that was my first thought.
I tried to find video of that season's game at Colorado that you mention on YouTube, but it's nowhere to be found. Anyway, Colorado wasn't great that season, but they did finish 17-14, so IMO to call them "abysmal" is misleading. IIRC, I think Fizer made a couple of free throws to go up by 3 with just a few seconds left, but the Buffs made a long 3 as time expired to send it into overtime and took it from there. We lost only two games in the Big 12 that season, both on the road, and it took 3 overtimes to lose those games (we had lost in double overtime at a good Oklahoma team to open up the conference season).
Drake on the other hand....woof. I think I remember reading an anecdote that before that game Larry Eustachy told Jamaal Tinsley that it would be the toughest game he would ever play in, and Tinsley looked at him like he was nuts. Turns out LE was right.
Here is the KenPom profile of that team; I think this might have been KenPom's 1st or 2nd year as a thing.
Anyway, it's worthy of discussion, but in my now 49 years of being a big Cyclone basketball fan on this great green planet I still think I would take that year's team over any others in program history. Stats and metrics are fun to follow and are meaningful, but sometimes the good 'ole eye test works just as well. LE certainly had his off-court issues, to say the least, that kept him and us from reaching our true potential, but the dude could flat out coach.
