Iowa State basketball’s uncommon recipe for a top-10 team: ‘We have to Moneyball this thing’

AMES, Iowa — Iowa State basketball coach T.J. Otzelberger likes to wind down at the end of a long day with … more college basketball. His wife, a former coach and WNBA player, has no problem with hoops before bed. So one night last December, the Otzelbergers tuned in to watch Seattle play Washington, where Otzelberger was an assistant for two seasons.

Seattle forward Brandton Chatfield looked like he belonged banging with Washington’s interior players. The way Chatfield went after rebounds, the way he screened — it was exactly what Otzelberger loves seeing from a big man.

On April 2, when Chatfield’s name showed up in the transfer portal, Otzelberger recognized it. Chatfield averaged 9.5 points and 5.4 rebounds last season at Seattle. As fast as it took to read those numbers would be how quickly most high-major coaches would rule him out as a target.

“Stats tend to draw big money in the portal,” Iowa State assistant Kyle Green said.

And that’s just one of the reasons they are low on the checklist when it comes to how Iowa State conducts business.

Otzelberger has turned the Cyclones into a winner by building the best defense in college basketball and finding hidden gems on the recruiting trail. His methodology is pretty simple: Iowa State works fast, isn’t afraid to go after a guy not on anyone else’s list and has specific criteria each player must meet, most of which have nothing to do with the stat sheet.

“They’re not going to take a kid that’s not going to fully buy in to playing as hard as they’re going to play,” said Alabama coach Nate Oats, who took his staff to watch Iowa State practice this fall. “Everybody on the team you can tell is 100 percent bought in on playing the way that they need them to play to win. They’ve definitely taken less talent and done more with it than anybody I’ve seen in college basketball.”

Loosened transfer and name, image and likeness compensation rules have helped turn most of the top of the college basketball talent market into an escalating bidding war, but Otzelberger has taken a different route. Iowa State, just like every high-major school, has a collective with an NIL budget, but Otzelberger doesn’t want guys who prioritize NIL or want to be promised anything. He prefers telling recruits the truth and then seeing if they agree with his assessment. “We’ve got to do the hard things,” he said this fall. “Let’s hang out and have some fun. But it’s still about the hard things and the truth, not about selling you on the NBA.”

This approach is not typically attracting players at the top of any rankings, but you do not finish second in the toughest conference in college basketball and earn a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament, as Iowa State did last season, without talent. In three years, Otzelberger’s Cyclones have made two Sweet 16s.

When his staff arrived in Ames three years ago and turned to restocking a roster that had just three returning players, they would often reference the book and film “Moneyball” — as in, “We have to Moneyball this thing.” The Cyclones aren’t college basketball’s Oakland A’s when it comes to compensating players, but they have no designs on becoming its Yankees.

“Iowa State’s going to be who Iowa State is,” ISU athletic director Jamie Pollard says. “And do we have to play in that space? Yes. But we’re never going to be a school that’s going to go buy it. … We’ve been doing NIL for three years. So Iowa State has proven that what we’re doing works. And doesn’t mean we’re spending the least, but it also doesn’t mean we’re spending the most. We’re spending it correctly.”

The Cyclones will start the year No. 5 in the AP poll, joining the women’s basketball and football programs in their respective sports’ top 10s. (Iowa State is the only school in the country with all three programs ranked that high in mid-October.) The other nine teams in the men’s AP preseason top 10 have an average of 6.2 players each who were ranked in the top 100 of the Recruiting Services Consensus Index coming out of high school. Iowa State has one.

Otzelberger doesn’t just ignore players on those lists, but he’s intentional in targeting high school players before the lists are even out. The transfer portal, where the most coveted players typically land at the schools with the largest NIL budgets, requires an even more delicate touch. In both markets, Otzelberger and his staff look for attainable players who can contribute to a team built in his image.

Which is where Chatfield comes in. He heard from Otzelberger the night he entered the portal. “Once they called me, I got super excited,” Chatfield said.

Other high-majors might eventually get far enough down the list to consider a player like Chatfield. The Cyclones made him a priority, in part because Otzelberger seeks out players who “want to be here.” Five days after entering the portal, Chatfield committed.

If a player wants to take a lot of official visits, Iowa State is out. If a player has a long list of schools he’s considering that gets shared on social media, it’s rare for the Cyclones to be on that list. Among their 12 scholarship players, nine took only one official visit and that was to Iowa State. One committed before even visiting. Only one player on the roster had an agent during the recruiting process.

“It’s guys that kind of fit the jigsaw puzzle for us,” Green said.

When Pollard tabbed Otzelberger to resurrect the Cyclones after a two-win 2020-21 season, Otzelberger knew exactly how he wanted to shape the program after a successful stint at South Dakota State and a less successful one at UNLV. He wasn’t going to try to be Fred Hoiberg or Greg McDermott, who originally hired him as an assistant in Ames. The Big 12 had changed. Bob Huggins and Press Virginia. The no-middle defense at Texas Tech. If you didn’t have NBA players, you better win with defense. That hadn’t been the way when Otzelberger worked under Hoiberg, but Otzelberger was not Hoiberg.

For the former D-III player who used to show up on opposing scouting reports for setting illegal screens and sneaking under bigger players to poke away rebounds, it was time to coach and build the program his way.

“What Iowa State attracts and what this part of the country attracts is people who like to roll up their sleeves and do the hard work,” Otzelberger said.

The ISU coaches needed to work quickly to reset the roster for 2021-22. Otzelberger wanted players who would practice hard every day, with high character and self-awareness.

“What they think they are,” Otzelberger would say, “we actually have to agree with them and believe that they’re that same thing.”

His first team finished fifth nationally in adjusted defensive efficiency and sixth in turnover rate. That level of success made the defense a staple of the program, and the Iowa State coaches started recruiting with it in mind. Otzelberger wants “linebacker” guards — 6-3, 205 pounds is the target — with physicality to match their frame.

“If you look at Keshon (Gilbert) and Tamin (Lipsey),” Otzelberger said of his two starting guards, “they search out contact as opposed to shy away from contact.”

In the frontcourt, Iowa State targeted bigs who could move laterally so that the Cyclones could be aggressive in ball screen defense. Otzelberger scoured film for effort-based traits. Is he first to the floor on a loose ball? Does he block out every time a shot goes up?

“I know it sounds easy, but I think that sometimes you can just get distracted by what you perceive the talent is and think you’re going to change somebody,” Otzelberger said. “We look more at it like if you’ve proven it somewhere else, we’re going to believe you can prove it here, as opposed to if you’ve never done it, hoping that it might work here.”

Rob Jones was the poster child. In three years, he averaged 5.5 points for the Cyclones and shot 45.3 percent at the free throw line, but…

“He was physical as heck. He blocked out every time. He loved to screen and he talked on defense,” Otzelberger said.

Jones also came from the mid-major level and had nearly identical averages to Chatfield, averaging 9.1 points and 5.0 rebounds in his final season at Denver. This season Otzelberger needed another Jones, who was the backbone of his defense, and Chatfield fit the mold.

On the morning of Sept. 26, Josiah Harrington, a 6-5 wing from Eldridge, Iowa, took an unofficial visit to Iowa State and committed before he and his parents left Otzelberger’s office to drive the three hours home. What made this commitment unusual: Harrington just started his sophomore year of high school. He’s the only player in the entire 2027 class already committed, according to 247Sports’ database.

Otzelberger wants to identify future targets as early as possible. This summer, he prioritized going to the Under-16 and Under-15 games to watch recruits in the Class of 2026 and 2027. “There’s very few coaches at those games,” he said.

In the 2025 class, Iowa State already has three players committed, so his work there was already done. Among its six players on the current roster who were high school recruits, four committed before their senior year of high school began. All six transfers were quick to sign too, every one committing in either March or April. (Players could enter the portal from March 18 to May 1 in 2024, but they do not have to commit within that window.)

“Whoever they recruit,” senior guard Curtis Jones said, “they’re going to get 98 percent of the time.”

When Dishon Jackson hit the portal on March 20, Iowa State was one day away from its opening game in the NCAA Tournament. Jackson said he heard from the Cyclones right away and daily after that. Otzelberger assistant JR Blount flew to Charlotte to see him between the second round and the Sweet 16.

“That spoke volumes,” Jackson said. “While they’re playing games, the coach is flying out and having discussions with me.”

Iowa State is often able to work so quickly because there’s a connection. To vet Chatfield and Jackson, Otzelberger called former ISU wing Aljaz Kunc, who overlapped with both at Washington State in 2020-21.

Jones played at Buffalo for Jim Whitesell, who also coached Blount at Loyola Chicago. Jones didn’t play a lot his first year at Buffalo and knew he needed to raise his standard. He told Otzelberger that he loved Whitesell for taking a chance on him and felt bad he wasn’t able to do enough to help Whitesell from being fired in 2023. That story, Otzelberger says, shifted Jones from a guy he was recruiting to one he had to have.

Once Jones entered the portal, he heard from Iowa State’s coaches every day.

“They weren’t recruiting nobody else,” Jones said. “They wanted me. They felt like they needed me. Other places they’ve got other options. Here, there wasn’t any other options. They wanted Curtis Jones.”

On campus, Jones experienced what it’s like to have Otzelberger’s faith.  The team meets often to discuss role definition, so it’s clear to every player what his and his teammates’ jobs are. Jones was Iowa State’s sixth man scorer and 3-point specialist, but he struggled early last season. Otzelberger never wavered, and Jones turned into the best sixth man in the league and shined in the NCAA Tournament, keeping Iowa State in its Sweet 16 loss to Illinois with 26 points, second only to Illini star Terrence Shannon Jr.

In the last three portal cycles, Otzelberger has mostly stuck to recruiting mid-major players; they tend to have a chip on their shoulder and want to prove themselves at a higher level. And ideally, Otzelberger would like to get to a point where he rarely has to recruit transfers. That model has worked at programs like Marquette and Purdue.

With high school recruits, Otzelberger can put in the time he’d prefer to establish those relationships. Iowa State largely sticks to the Midwest so his staff can visit recruits frequently and vice versa. The hometowns of 11 of the 14 players on the roster are within a six-hour drive of Ames.

If a recruit’s interest isn’t reciprocated, Otzelberger isn’t afraid to move on quickly. And if a recruit is taking multiple visits yet Iowa State is staying in the hunt, there are usually special circumstances.

Sophomore Milan Momcilovic is one of only two top-50 recruits Otzelberger has signed at Iowa State. Momcilovic had some big brands in pursuit — UCLA, Michigan State and Virginia — but Iowa State was the first high-major to offer him, after visiting his high school to watch open gyms following his sophomore year. Otzelberger was confident enough in their relationship to not back out once Momcilovic started visiting other schools on his list.

“The schools that come in late, it doesn’t feel real,” Momcilovic says. “You don’t really know where you stand with them and how much you actually like them. This school sells more the deeper connection with you, the trust, all that. The other schools, it’s, ‘Look at all these facilities we got, all the Final Fours, national championships.’

“The trust (Otzelberger) had in me, I was his No. 1 guy. You can tell that through the process. S—, seeing that, I wanted to come.”

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Otzelberger keeps a yellow Post-It note on his standup desk that has Iowa State’s preseason ranking in the Big 12 coaches’ poll, compared to its final ranking. In Year 1, the Cyclones were picked 10th and finished seventh; Year 2, picked eighth, finished fifth; Year 3, picked seventh, finished second.

During the first week of practice in September, Otzelberger had a blank space next to “YR 4” on his Post-It, but he knew what was coming. The Cyclones would eventually be picked third in the Big 12. Every national preseason poll has them in the top 10.

It’s almost an unsettling position. In his first three years, everyone was impressed when the Cyclones actually won. Now, they should win.

The next day, Otzelberger stood just inside the semicircle at the top of the key as his players performed a closeout drill. He and his staff wore shirts with “Enthusiasm” written on the back. The practice gym was loud, but apparently not loud enough. Otzelberger blew his whistle.

“Everybody talk every rep!”

The players lined up on the sideline to run. Every drill must be done with precision and passion. On closeouts, even in live action, his players are robotic. On the left side of the floor, their stick hand is always the left; on the right side, it’s the right.

“Very militant-minded,” Jackson said. “You hear how other coaches talk, they’re like, ‘Oh, we’re gonna do this. We can try to do this.’ TJ is, ‘We will do this. We will do that. We are going to get this done, and we’re going to do it this way.’”

Later in practice, when Saint Mary’s transfer Joshua Jefferson turned to give a look about a foul called on him challenging a 3-pointer, Otzelberger blew his whistle. Everyone on the line. “We will not react to a call!”

His current challenge is making sure Jefferson plays with the same level of effort as everyone else.

“I think we put in a lot more work than other teams do, and it shows out there on the floor,” Jefferson said, hours after Otzelberger called him out. “And then he just recruits dudes that aren’t scared. Really tough guys, and then you’re able to punk other teams.”

The next day, the coaches wore shirts with “Toughness” on the back. Jefferson took a shot in the nose, put a wad of cotton in his right nostril, and kept playing.

This is what Otzelberger is after. Other coaches pay for shooting and skill. Iowa State pays for a mentality.

“I don’t think T.J. is going to try to buy his way to the top,” Pollard said. “He wants to develop his way to the top.”

(Photo: Chris Gardner / Getty Images)