Drake’s Division II transfers are proving they can win in March Madness

Bennett Stirtz understood time was winding down on him Thursday night. Ben McCollum was frantically waving his arms at him on the sideline, and the Drake fans sitting behind the Bulldogs’ coach were doing the same thing.

They were imploring Stirtz to shoot, so he did — a 25-foot teardrop 3 as the shot clock expired that hit nothing but net.

“I don’t really know what I was doing there,” Stirtz said with a sheepish grin afterward.

Oh, but the boys from Drake know exactly what they’re doing.

They proved that in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, when a team full of Division II transfers including Stirtz, and led by their old D-II coach from Northwest Missouri State, beat back a stiff second-half challenge from Missouri for a 67-57 victory.

The win pushed the No. 11 seed Bulldogs (31-3) into a second-round showdown Saturday against third-seeded Texas Tech, and within one win of reaching the Sweet 16 for the first time since 1971.

“The reason you do this is the stage, it allows you to pass a message, which is tough kids, connected kids, kids that love each other, can still win,” said McCollum, who bypassed several Division I offers while leading the Bearcats to four national titles, only to finally accept the monumental task of replacing Darian DeVries at Drake last April.

“I get a lot of joy out of just me seeing it, to be honest,” McCollum said. “I’m pretty selfish about it. I love seeing these guys every day. I love going to practice. There’s a level of memories and things you go through that nothing can replace.”

The Bulldogs are all about making some March memories.

Given where they came from, who could blame them?

Stirtz was the kid from Liberty, Missouri, that none of the big schools — including the Tigers — wanted out of high school. So, he headed up the road to Maryville and Northwest Missouri State, where McCollum was busy building a juggernaut, and became a Jimmy Chitwood-like star who seemed to do just about everything on the hardwood.

Stirtz was joined by Isaiah Jackson, who grew up not far from Liberty in Independence and was similarly overlooked. And by Daniel Abreu, who grew up in Springfield, Missouri, and Mitch Mascari, who found his way there from Geneva, Illinois.

“When I signed my little contract,” Abreu recalled, “I thought that was it. I’m a D-II athlete. And I was OK with that.”

Yet things were unfolding at Drake last year that changed all their lives. DeVries left for West Virginia, and McCollum bit on the opportunity to replace him. And when 15 players left the program, the new coach began to fill the holes by calling up some of his old players, giving those outcasts and misfits the opportunity to join him in D-I.

“I brought winners with me. That’s what I brought,” McCollum said. “I guess my superpower is finding winners, finding tough kids and believing in them. I know I’ve tried to be humble, but man, I believed in these kids.”

They’re paying back that belief in a big way.

The Bulldogs already have set a school record for wins. They swept the regular- and postseason Missouri Valley Conference titles. And with a raucous crowd behind them Thursday night, they ended Drake’s four-game skid in first-round NCAA Tournament games.

“It’s hard to put into words, because personally, I was in Division II and now I’m here, in a tournament I’ve dream of playing in. To get even just one win is insane,” Jackson said. “It even tops it off when you play a team from your home state.”

Nobody from Drake seems content with just one win, though. There is a genuine belief that a program that relies so heavily on D-II transfers can beat anyone in D-I, and it has earned another chance to prove it on Saturday night.

“We can go as far as we want to,” Jackson said. “As long as we stay together, believe in each other, and we do the little things, we can make a run and surprise a lot of people in the nation.”

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AP freelancer Avery Osen contributed to this report.

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