Bennett Stirtz and Daniel Abreu have this ritual. Before every practice and every game—every half, in truth—the Drake Bulldogs teammates have to make three-point shots simultaneously. But it’s a bit more complicated than that.
Abreu has to toss a basketball to Stirtz, who already has one in his hands. Stirtz has to knock the ball back to Abreu using his basketball. Then they have to shoot it at the same time. And make it. Then it’s time to get on with the business of playing.
“We call it Splash Bros,” says Stirtz, the stoic star guard.
“It’s just chemistry,” says Abreu, the more emotive forward. “That’s what we do.”
These are the silly-but-vital bonding elements that can only come with time together. In a transient era where college basketball teammates come and go annually, the days of spending a thousand hours in the same gym with someone are increasingly rare. For Stirtz and Abreu, this is Year 3 of Splash Bro-ing through life in unison.
And, not coincidentally, winning. Their college record together is 86–11.
They are roommates, Bible-study sidekicks and a lethal pick-and-roll tandem. They were never supposed to be doing what they’re doing at the level they’re doing it.
Stirtz, Abreu, Mitch Mascari and Isaiah Jackson all joined coach Ben McCollum in moving from Northwest Missouri State to Drake in 2024. Some fans who wanted name recognition were unimpressed with the hire of McCollum to replace Darian DeVries, who left to coach the West Virginia Mountaineers. They were even less impressed by his importation of four starters from Division II.
“There were some natural questions from some of the fans,” McCollum says. “We did feel a lot of that. It probably put another chip on the players’ shoulders.”
Athletic director Brian Hardin felt it, too. He received emails and social-media blasts deriding “D-II Drake.”
Today, D-II Drake stands alone as champions of the D-I Missouri Valley Conference, just the third solo league title in the school’s 119 seasons of playing basketball. The Bulldogs are 26–3, tied for the most wins in the nation and 3–0 against power-conference competition—in a just world, they would be comfortably assured of an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament. In the less-just reality in which we live, their only guaranteed path to March Madness is via winning Arch Madness, the Valley tournament in St. Louis that starts next week.
Last year, the Indiana State Sycamores lost by four points to Drake in the Valley tournament final, falling to 28–6. They were left out of the Big Dance. Only once in the last seven tourneys has the MVC put two teams in the NCAA field.
“It’s total crap,” says Hardin, citing Drake’s No. 59 status in the NCAA NET rankings, an analytics tool the tournament selection committee leans on when picking the 68-team field. “It certainly feels like with mid-majors, they look for reasons to keep you out instead of reasons to put you in.”
The NET includes margin of victory in its calculations, which means blowouts are rewarded. Drake is 364th and dead last nationally in tempo, which means fewer possessions and closer games. The Bulldogs have no victories over D-I opponents by 20 points or more. But they do have neutral-court victories over the Vanderbilt Commodores (who are almost assured of an NCAA bid), the Kansas State Wildcats and the Miami Hurricanes.
Those wins came in November and December, when high-major teams loaded with transfers from different locations are trying to pull their disparate parts together. McCollum brought roster continuity with him from Northwest Missouri, and the benefits of that familiarity with one another were abundantly clear from the start.
“Their offenses were a lot easier to scout,” McCollum says. “They’ve got better players at the power-conference level, but we were able to scout it and take some things away. They don’t run much, because you can’t. It’s early in the season with a lot of new guys, and you’re managing egos. It’s impossible to run many actions with so many new pieces.”
McCollum’s team can run a lot of actions. The Bulldogs are a pain to prepare for and play against, operating at a dawdling pace but never standing still. Stirtz, the likely Missouri Valley Player of the Year, is the unhurried mix-master, perpetually working off screens and firing chest passes to keep the ball moving ahead of the defense.
The 6' 4" Stirtz leads Drake in scoring (18.8 points per game), assists (6.0) and steals (2.2). More importantly, he leads the nation in minutes played at 39.1 per game—never leaving the floor, never changing expressions, never being flustered into playing faster than McCollum wants him to.
“I just grew up watching basketball and I’m not the quickest guy laterally, so I’m going to have to play my speed,” Stirtz says. “No one can speed me up. That’s just how I’ve learned to play throughout the years.”
He’s a coach’s son from Liberty, Mo., just north of Kansas City. He didn’t play on a major AAU circuit and went unrecruited by Division I schools. But Northwest Missouri, in nearby Maryville, wanted him badly and had a championship pedigree to sell. Under McCollum, the Bearcats had won four D-II national titles from 2017 to ’22.
Northwest Missouri went 31–3 and 29–5 in Stirtz’s two seasons there. That gave McCollum 13 straight winning seasons in a job he started at the age of 28. The Iowa native had interviewed for a few D-I jobs over the years, including the Drake gig in 2018, when DeVries got it.
Hardin and McCollum kept in touch after that, forming a friendship and talking several times a year. When it became clear that DeVries would be a strong candidate for a power-conference job last year, Hardin knew who was going to get his first call.
As it turned out, one of McCollum’s sons was playing on a travel team out of Des Moines. So shortly after DeVries took the WVU job, McCollum drove his son the 2½ hours from Maryville, Mo., to a workout and then went to Hardin’s house to interview.
When it came together, McCollum knew he wanted to bring the core of his NWMSU team with him. Their response, when he offered? “Yes yes yes yes yes,” Abreu says.
They wanted to keep playing for the intense but loyal McCollum (“A focused lunatic,” as Abreu calls him). They also wanted to prove they could keep winning at a level where they were scantly recruited, if at all.
But now that they’ve proved it, there is an absence of “told you so” bragging.
“It’s weird,” Abreu says. “There’s a proudness to it, but not surprise. With the culture that we have, it’s almost like, ‘Hey, this is what we do.’ It doesn’t matter what level it is, we’re going to compete and we’re going to try to give you everything we have. There is a lot of skill at the D-II level. I think it’d be a bad idea to underestimate D-II guys.”
As the wins have piled up, the opposite has happened—D-II Drake has become the team Valley opponents circle on the calendar. This week has been a road gauntlet.
On Sunday, Drake survived an overtime brawl with Northern Iowa in a charged atmosphere in Cedar Falls. Then they came to Evansville on Wednesday to play in a dead arena.
The Ford Center is a nice, modern gym in downtown Evansville that has some familiarity to the Bulldogs—this is where they won the 2019, ’21 and ’22 D-II national titles. But the Purple Aces are rebuilding, and the current 11–19 team didn’t attract much of a crowd when Drake came to town.
That doesn’t mean Evansville didn’t throw everything it had at the Bulldogs, though. Coach David Ragland employed a variety of gimmick defenses aimed at taking the ball away from Stirtz, primarily a triangle and two and a “stick and three,” as McCollum called—two big men in the paint, and three perimeter defenders playing man-to-man.
Drake solved those as the first half went along, taking an 11-point lead into halftime on a savvy Stirtz play. He slowly brought the ball up as the clock wound down, got a high screen from Abreu, flashed into the paint and pitched it back to Abreu for a three from the top of the key—one Splash Bro to another.
Drake appeared to be in cruise control, then promptly fell apart to start the second half. The Bulldogs went more than four minutes without scoring and lost every bit of the lead, with McCollum growing steadily more agitated on the sideline. At one point he flipped his trademark blue tie over his shoulder; at another he looked like he wanted to break his clipboard. But he didn’t call timeout during that stretch.
This was simply the way the game was going to go—tense throughout the final 15 minutes, with Drake’s lead never getting larger than five and Evansville briefly budging ahead for a single possession. It took a series of free throws in the final minute for the Bulldogs to escape the Pocket City with a 65–61 victory.
In the hallway outside the locker room afterward, McCollum untucked his white dress shirt and decompressed with his staff. He was perplexed and frustrated about what happened in the second half.
“We were just awful,” he laments. “One of those trap-type games.”
But the big picture is what resonated with McCollum’s players—they were league champions, undisputed, now 26–3. Happy music thumped out of the locker room as players filed out to do interviews and grab food off a table.
The Missouri Valley is a good basketball league run on modest budgets. Home games are mom-and-pop operations, where the Evansville athletic director stays late to take down banners himself. At the power-conference level, the million-dollar AD delegates that duty to any of three-dozen underlings.
But Drake did have the luxury of a chartered flight waiting at the Evansville airport to take it back to Des Moines. That’s one difference from Northwest Missouri State. The winning, though, remains the same.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as ‘D-II Drake’ Making Division I Men’s Basketball Take Notice.
