How Drake Basketball Became the Ultimate Modern NCAA Underdog Story
One year ago, Drake looked like it would be yet another victim of the transfer portal. But after hiring Ben McCollum, bringing four players up from Division II, and adding two other transfers, the program was revitalized by the very thing that originally decimated it.
The Drake Bulldogs are the best story of the men’s college basketball season. We love an underdog—especially in March—and the Missouri Valley Conference champs are taking that to another level. They rank 358th in the country in amount of Division I experience, per KenPom, and not because they have a young roster. It’s actually full of upperclassmen. But at this time last year, four of Drake’s starters were playing for Division II Northwest Missouri State. Those players all followed their coach, Ben McCollum, to Des Moines, Iowa, last March. And according to the first-year Drake coach, who previously led Northwest Missouri State to four national titles in a six-year span, that had been the plan since rumors began that he would be hired at Drake.
“I asked them [if they were coming] before I even took the job,” McCollum told me days before he led Drake to the Missouri Valley Conference championship and earned an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. “They were excited about the opportunity to build the culture. Obviously, we didn’t expect it to look like this.”
“D-II Drake” enters the tournament with a program-record 30 wins and only three losses. That’s an improvement from Northwest Missouri State’s 29-5 record last season, so no matter how Drake’s round-of-64 matchup with Missouri goes on Thursday night, many of the team’s players have found more success against D-I opponents than those in D-II. It’s like we’re watching a classic sports debate playing out in real life: How would a team that’s dominating at a lower level fare against top competition? In this case, quite well.
Drake’s success this season is genuinely shocking, and not just because of the lack of D-I experience on the roster. About 51 weeks ago, the Bulldogs didn’t have a roster. Former coach Darian Devries was hired by West Virginia just three days after Drake was eliminated from the tournament last year, prompting a mass exodus of players to the transfer portal. Leading scorer Tucker Devries, Darian’s son, followed his dad to Morgantown. Rising sophomore Kevin Overton also went to the Big 12, transferring to Texas Tech. Junior Conor Enright landed with DePaul in the Big East. In the end, 11 total players transferred. The program was emptied out like a Spirit Halloween on November 1, abruptly ending the best four-year stretch in Drake history. It was a crappy time to be a Drake basketball fan. “Well that’s 4/5ths of starting lineup gone,” a user on the DrakeNation.com message board lamented in a post written on March 25 of last year. “It’s very easy to hate what college sports has become.”
That’s a sentiment shared by many fan bases of smaller athletic programs that don’t have the resources to facilitate big NIL deals and keep their best players from entering the portal. The NCAA established more lax transfer rules in 2021, allowing athletes to transfer one time during their collegiate career without having to sit out for a year. And in 2024, that rule was amended to allow athletes to transfer as many times as they want without having to sit out, encouraging even more player movement and reinforcing the feeling that oftentimes, small schools act as feeder systems for the programs with the deepest pockets.
Last March, it looked as if Drake basketball would be another victim of this new age of college sports, where the haves get even more by raiding the have-nots. But what started as a cautionary tale ended up as a portal success story. The same mechanism that led to the decimation of the Drake program almost immediately delivered a whole new roster, led by McCollum’s four D-II transfers and two other key additions. This Drake season isn’t just an underdog story. It doubles as one about how the power of the portal can be used to rejuvenate a program just as quickly as it can tear one down.
McCollum’s start at Northwest Missouri State was not as successful as his start at Drake. His teams won 22 games total over his first two seasons, a mark he’s already surpassed before the end of his first Division I season. It helps that he didn’t have to start from scratch this time. With the core of his roster following him to Des Moines, he wasn’t really abandoning the project he started 15 years ago—but rather picking up where he left off at a different school.
McCollum had built an offensive powerhouse at Northwest Missouri. The Bearcats led Division II in offensive efficiency in each of McCollum’s last seven seasons at the program, per Synergy. We’ve never seen a run like that in Division I. And the offensive success wasn’t sparked by revolutionary ideas, but rather by the oldest play in basketball: the pick-and-roll. McCollum cites a Lawrence Frank instructional video on ball screens from the early aughts as a major influence on his offense. “The way [Frank] taught things in that clinic was just so simple,” McCollum said of the former Nets coach. “The angles of ball screens. Understanding how to force the [defender to go] over [the screen]. Understanding the variety of reads based on coverages. How each ball screen can change based on where you place certain personnel. I just added little pieces to it based on those concepts that I learned from watching that. So it certainly helped me as a young coach and continues to help me to this day.”
McCollum combined the concepts he picked up from that clinic with the motion offense he learned under his mentor coach David Moe to form what McCollum calls a “ball screen motion offense.” The ball whips around the court as the five Drake players flow into different screening actions—both on and off the ball. Most of the screens are set for star point guard Bennett Stirtz, who has averaged 19.1 points and 5.7 assists per game this season. The Missouri Valley player of the year leads the country with 677 screens used as a ball handler this season, per Synergy. And that’s counting only the screens that led directly to a shot—for Stirtz, the screener, or a player off the ball. On some possessions, he’ll receive four or five screens, just as he’s dribbling around and looking for openings.
“We’ll screen it 100 times if it doesn’t work,” McCollum told me. “You can shift the defender's feet multiple ways, and a lot of times it becomes more difficult. We just find a variety of ways to do that, and rescreening has really helped to kind of beat that guy up.”
Because of that patient approach, Drake runs the slowest offense in men’s college basketball. The Bulldogs’ average possession lasts 22 seconds, which ranks dead last in the country, per KenPom. They average just 58.8 possessions per game, which also ranks last. “We don't necessarily want to play that slow,” McCollum told me. “But we’re not going to settle for ‘early average.’ We're going to make sure that we get exactly what we want from an offensive perspective. In doing that, sometimes it runs that shot clock down quite a ways.”
Drake doesn’t look like a slow basketball team, despite what the numbers say. The Bulldogs may work deeper into the shot clock than most teams, but they get to fourth and fifth options in the same time it takes other teams to get through two or three. They’ll chip away at the defense until they crack its shell. And while these long possessions can look like choreographed set plays, McCollum coaches his players to read how the defense is operating and trusts them to get to the right actions to attack it.
It takes a team with a high collective basketball IQ to play that style. But simply having players who know how to hoop also helps, and Stirtz is a legitimate star talent who has captured the eye of NBA scouts this year. He’s a 6-foot-4 point guard with exceptional court vision, elite passing skills, and the ability to shoot from range off the dribble. That’s a rare combination at the mid-major level. And it’s even rarer to see an upperclassman with that skill set since those guys usually bolt for the pros after one or two years in college. As effective as McCollum’s offensive approach is, the key to Drake’s success this season has been having the best player on the court in every game it’s played thus far. It’s a lot easier to coach a productive offense when you have a guy who can get a bucket whenever you need one. Stirtz ranks in the 91st percentile of iso possessions in college basketball this season, and his 1.11 points per possession average is an 88th percentile mark, per Synergy. The junior has had a number of hero ball moments at the end of a dying clock, but none more memorable than his game-winning dagger from deep to beat Kansas State in December.
Whether it’s a pick-and-roll or an isolation play, the offense runs almost entirely through Stirtz. But Drake’s other transfers have carved out key roles, too. Mitch Mascari is the only reliable shooter who plays off the ball. He runs around endless screens trying to free himself for a shot, and his gravity opens up space for others. Isaiah Jackson isn’t much of a scorer or shooter—to the point where opponents will leave him open on the perimeter—but he’s the team’s best on-ball defender, and he can handle the ball when Stirtz needs a break. Daniel Abreu is an undersized power forward who can score around the basket or pop out for a 3-pointer after setting a screen on the perimeter. And then there are the non–Northwest Missouri transfers. Cam Manyawu (Wyoming) and Tavion Banks (Northwest Florida State College) provide size and the D-I-level athleticism McCollum’s Drake roster had been lacking. “They’re big and physical, and they have a little different presence defensively,” McCollum said. “They’re ball getters. They get after the boards.”
McCollum put together quite the team after just a few weeks of digging around in the portal, and it didn’t take long for the locker room to coalesce. “We scrimmaged Texas Tech [in October], and it was like, Oh, OK, we're there,” McCollum said. “Texas Tech’s really good, and it was a good scrimmage for us. We kind of saw it—we saw that we could play at that level.”
That confidence carried over into the season. Drake won its first 12 games, including victories over Miami, Vanderbilt, and Kansas State. After two early slipups in conference play, the Bulldogs have won 18 of their last 19. They’ve also avenged all three of their losses this season after beating Bradley in the MVC title game (and UIC and Murray State in the regular season). If Drake, the 11th seed in the West bracket, can get past sixth-seeded Missouri on Thursday night, it could get another crack at Texas Tech, a 3-seed, in the next round—this time, in front of a national audience that would get to see what the Bulldogs did during that October scrimmage. That these (former) Division II guys can play.
Thanks to the transfer portal, we’re seeing talent trickle up through every level of college basketball. The power conference schools are pulling players from the mid-majors; the mid-major programs are doing the same to low majors and Division II. The smaller Division I schools and their fan bases may complain about being in the downline of this talent pyramid scheme—and fairly so—but they can also benefit from the system by bringing in experienced players who’ve developed at even smaller schools. Everything worked out for Drake in the end. The Bulldogs ended up with a strong roster of experienced players and a 30-win season. It was D-II Northwest Missouri State that got the raw end of the deal. McCollum’s old team finished 5-23 this season and fell to the 15th percentile in offensive efficiency, per Synergy.
The system is still rigged for the big programs to come out on top. But there are paths to competitiveness for underdogs in the modern landscape of college basketball. If Drake’s success continues this weekend and this instant rebuild gets even more national attention, the Bulldogs could wind up as McCollum’s new “old team”: His name has already been mentioned in major job searches. It would be difficult for Drake to replace a coach like McCollum if he does leave, but that’s not a new problem for smaller schools. Big programs were poaching coaches from mid-majors long before the transfer portal opened up in 2018. Now, though, the portal has given those teams another method to rebuild. And in Drake’s case this season, build it back stronger than it had ever been before.
