How Drake’s Bennett Stirtz, Ben McCollum called their March Madness shot a year ago
The red numerals on the clock had reached a single digit, just nine seconds, and Drake guard Bennett Stirtz stood, oh, 40 feet from the basket.
Go time.
Actually, wait.
He took a peek to the sideline, where his head coach, Ben McCollum, pushed two palms toward the floor, a universal signal to replace one word.
Patience.
With nine seconds on the shot clock, mind you. Stirtz pounded the basketball against the hardwood floor a couple of times and waited for his teammates to clear out.
Eight. Seven.
He moved toward the basket.
Six. Five.
And then, inexplicably, he launched a running a three-pointer off one foot.
It was good, of course.
Drake beat Missouri on the sport’s most entertaining stage, the opening round of the NCAA Tournament, a 67-57 final here in Wichita.
“That’s the first time I’ve ever done that in a game,” Stirtz said. “It kind of hit me, like, why did I just shoot that?”
And when it went in?
“OK, I’m never doing that again.”
Less than 24 hours into March Madness, the locals are gone. Kansas. Mizzou. Kansas State never even made it.
But, oh boy, is Kansas City alive in March.
And the best part: It’s represented by a team left for dead.
That’s a storyline most anyone tries to adopt this time of year — us against the world. These kids? This coach? They’ve lived it.
Stirtz, who graduated from Liberty High School north of Kansas City, headlines a team with five KC kids. He dreamed of playing for Kansas State. They didn’t want him.
It’s not just about them. Look up the national recruiting profile from high school, and you’ll find his ranking: N/A.
There wasn’t a Division I coach in America who believed he could play at this level.
Well, at least not until Drake turned Ben McCollum into a Division I coach. After leaving Northwest Missouri State to take the job with Drake, McCollum’s first move was to ask Stirtz to tag along. With them tagged along doubt.
But during last year’s NCAA Tournament, the two exchanged text messages every day.
We’re in this thing next year. That’s us.
A player and coach, overlooked no longer.
But why were they ever?
There will be a narrative, at least nationally, that this Drake season, or even this Drake upset (technically), came out of nowhere. It didn’t. A narrative that you couldn’t have seen this coming.
How didn’t you see this coming? What more did McCollum have to prove?
Here’s his record since 2016: 284-24.
It will take you a calculator to total the wins. Just some math in your head to figure the losses.
There are some Division I athletic directors across the Midwest who ought to feel some embarrassment by what they watched Thursday in Wichita, because what they saw was a clinic. Never mind that. What they saw was the effect of a clinic taught every day in Des Moines, Iowa, for the last 12 months and Maryville, Missouri, for a decade prior.
It was there. OK, it was there after a brief passing with Wells Fargo, and after he once told his mom he wasn’t cut out to coach. But it was there.
The world ignored it.
They can’t ignore it any longer.
Missouri, a team that finished ninth in the NCAA in scoring, didn’t crack 60 points Thursday night.
Drake simply doesn’t care who it’s playing. It invokes its own style, its own patient standard that encompasses the slowest tempo in the country, with an offense and defense equal contributors to it. There is no meeting halfway. You play on the Bulldogs’ terms.
Mizzou sped the game up for maybe five minutes. That was deep into the second half. That’s it. Drake owned the rest.
The answer to that five-minute-spurt? Back to Stirtz. In the most hostile environment he’s ever played, he exudes calmness.
It’s a fascinating contrast with the man who roams the sideline.
See, these two are terrific stories on their own. They’ve been disregarded, overlooked, under-recruited, for far too long. Stirtz might’ve wanted to play hoops at Kansas State, but it wasn’t lost on him which team he beat Thursday.
“I think it’s just another chip on your shoulder — your home state didn’t want you,” Stirtz said.
But the brilliance of this particular team is their story together. There’s a similar thread between the two, but they are oh so different otherwise.
McCollum lives and dies with every bucket, every rebound, every bounce of the ball. He can’t help it.
His point guard, the Missouri Valley Conference player of the year, is quite the opposite.
“They’re so different,” said Bennett’s father, Roger, who coached Liberty High to more than 400 wins, including a 2001 state title, before stepping down to follow his son’s college career. “But their mindset and their drive and the simplicity that they can make things, they’re like identical twins inside.”
They converse on the same wavelength. There’s an understanding.
It traces back to that text exchange last March. As the college basketball world centered on the madness, two people from Maryville centered on joining the party.
They didn’t just get here.
They won.
Afterward, they shared a makeshift stage in the tunnels at Intrust Bank Arena. And for awhile, McCollum offered some coach-speak, crediting others, sidestepping questions about himself.
Then popped a question about whether he possibly could have envisioned this just a year ago.
Little did the reporter know: He’d been texting about it.
“I expected it. That’s what I expected. I expected exactly this,” he said. “I brought winners with me. That’s what I brought. I guess my superpower is finding winners, finding tough kids and believing in them.”
He expected it.
Everyone else is just late to the party.
This story was originally published March 21, 2025 at 5:30 AM with the headline "How Drake’s Bennett Stirtz, Ben McCollum called their March Madness shot a year ago."