Turncoats

CHA finds its voice, and Iowa gets its biggest win of the year.

I’ve spent the last few weeks watching the Ken Burns documentary on The American Revolution. It’s a twelve-hour series, and remarkable for its ability to take the mythmaking of the Revolution and turn it into a chronological story. In thirteen years of public schooling, I don’t think we ever discussed the British Southern Strategy that dominated the last two years of the war, or the missteps that the British made along the way.

When the Brits invaded North Carolina, Major Patrick Ferguson sent message to the settlers in the Blue Ridge Mountains that he would “"march his army over the mountains, hang their leaders, and lay waste the country with fire and sword” unless they surrendered. The settlers — who became known as the “Overmountain Men” — responded by crossing the mountains en masse, with ammo made from lead they had mined themselves, and attacked the British. They killed Ferguson, captured his army, and forced Cornwallis to retreat back to South Carolina.

If Washington is the star of the series, his co-star for the first eight hours is Benedict Arnold, the Patriot general who was deployed to some of the most difficult tasks of the war. Arnold laid siege to the British in Boston, invaded Quebec, retook Fort Ticonderoga at the Battle of Saratoga, and governed Philadelphia following the Patriot recapture from the British. In a war with remarkably few battles, Arnold seemed to show up in almost all of them. While acting as governor of Philadelphia, Arnold married the daughter of a Loyalist who assisted him in switching sides. By 1779, Arnold was sharing troop locations, and in 1780, he had made a deal with the British to hand over West Point — and, effectively, the entire Patriot position on the Hudson River — in exchange for a commission and a bag of money. Washington spent most of the rest of the war trying to hunt down Arnold, and told subordinates to hang the traitor if he were to be caught.

Arnold’s timing could not have been worse. Two weeks after he switched sides, the Overmountain Men defeated Ferguson and stopped the British invasion of North Carolina. The Brits spent the rest of the fall losing most of South Carolina. Not only was the Southern Strategy on the verge of failure, but Arnold’s reversal angered Washington enough to bring the Americans out of their long-held positions around New York in pursuit of the traitor. It galvanized an American side that had stalled. One year later, Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, and he joined Arnold on a boat back to England.

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Iowa defeated ninth-ranked Nebraska 57-52 Tuesday night, in a slog more reminiscent of trench warfare than the Revolution. Bennett Stirtz scored 25 of Iowa’s 57 points; only Cooper Koch managed double figures beyond him, and Iowa shot just 33 percent from the field. But Iowa outrebounded Nebraska by 13, and managed 12 offensive rebounds, extending possession after possession until the Cornhuskers had been ground into a fine paste.

But neither Stirtz nor Koch was the focal point last night, because Pryce Sandfort was making his return to Iowa City. Sandfort, of course, was a Hawkeye for the two previous seasons, playing alongside his brother Payton. Last spring, Payton got drafted and Pryce left for Lincoln. He has since become the offensive focal point of a Nebraska team that opened the season with 20 consecutive wins, and leads the Huskers in minutes played. He’s made more three-point shots than any other two Cornhuskers combined, and has been the Kenpom MVP in six of Nebraska’s eleven Big Ten wins to date.

In the transfer portal/NIL era of college basketball, players arrive and leave all the time. This is especially true when a program makes a coaching change: Iowa’s entire roster, except for Koch, left when Fran McCaffery was replaced last spring. That included Iowa natives like Josh Dix, who were actively courted by Ben McCollum but opted to move to Creighton. Most of those departures were met with a shrug at worst.

But something didn’t sit right with Sandfort’s transfer. It may be that his brother had been such a warrior for the program, or that he had so clearly turned the corner under McCaffery last year, or the simple fact that he’s an Iowa kid who opted to cross the Missouri River and take sides with the Cornhuskers. The rivalry between the schools isn’t as pronounced in basketball, but it still exists.

Regardless of the reason, Pryce Sandfort walked out onto the Carver Hawkeye parquet on Tuesday night as a modern Benedict Arnold. The erstwhile mild-mannered Carver Hawkeye crowd came out of hiding like they were the Overmountain Men. The students jeered and chanted. The fans stood and roared. It looked and felt like a true home court, with much of it focused on Sandfort.

And it clearly had an effect: Despite playing 37 minutes, Sandfort made just three shots all night, tying his Big Ten season-low, and did not record a single rebound or assist. And when Sandfort — and Mast, and Hoiberg, and Lawrence, and the rest of the Cornhuskers — could not muster more than 52 points, those Overmountain Men swarmed the court like they had breached the defenses at King’s Mountain.

It felt like a game of immense consequence on television, as well, as BTN repeatedly cut to Sandfort’s parents, clad in red and white, behind the Nebraska bench. BTN color commentator Shon Morris was frequently shouting over the shouts and boos of Iowa fans, incensed by every minor grievance. Sandfort’s presence turned an otherwise-innocuous mid-week Big Ten game into something like a morality play, with that “9” next to Nebraska on the scorebug adding further to the stakes. For the first time in years, Iowa came through, and put their own Benedict Arnold on a boat back to England with Fred Hoiberg.

In the light of day, it feels a bit unseemly. Iowa’s best player, and most of the Hawkeye roster, was taken from another in-state program. I can’t imagine an Iowa crowd becoming incensed over Brock Harding or Carter Kingsbury returning. But if the long war of this basketball season needed a precipitating event to end the stalemate and kickstart Iowa’s run into March, Pryce Sandfort’s return and defeat will have to do.