Courtesy St. Louis Globe-Democrat

(March 25, 2010) Gary Rima will broadcast Friday’s Northern Iowa match-up with Michigan State at the local level for Panthers’ fans. Having done radio shows, play-by-play, talk shows, been an afternoon disc jockey and radio salesman, this is the highlight of his career.

“You could pull any adjective out of your Webster dictionary and it would apply. It’s been awesome, tremendous, historic, epic and on-and-on,” said Rima.

Like most schools who make it this far, the fan base is just over-the-top. The Panthers are in unchartered territory. They’ve never been to the Sweet 16 and have doubled their number of NCAA tournament wins. Going into the weekend in Oklahoma City, Northern Iowa had only won one game in the history of the school. So to get to the Sweet 16 by beating Kansas was pretty special. Everybody’s wearing purple and gold. Everything with UNI on it is flying off the shelf.

“I have been with UNI since 1993-94 and living the dream as a sports broadcaster. I got into it in an unorthodox way. I am just finishing my 35th year of doing sports play-by-play, 17th year with UNI and it’s been a great ride.”

Back in 2004, 2005 and 2006, Northern Iowa went to back-to-back-to-back NCAA tournaments after going through times after 1998 where fan support was down and they didn’t have a lot of talent.

Rima thought playing Kansas was a great opportunity for the university to be taking on one of the top college basketball programs in the country and get great exposure. He knows had the Panther’s received better than a nine seed they wouldn’t have been taking on the Jayhawks.

“I had a feeling that it was just going to be a good game. I certainly wasn’t predicting a win or anything like that but I really thought our guys matched up halfway decently. Kansas played a man-to-man defense and we’ve always been good against those because of the number of plays that we run. We kind of shocked the college basketball world with what we did,” said Rima.

And he remembers Globe-Democrat.com’s Alvin Reid writing that Northern Iowa could pull an upset over KU.

“I read that article and loved it. I even talked about it on my talk show. He was a KU alum and was concerned when he saw UNI in the bracket and that we were a team that could probably knock them off and end up in St. Louis.

“After Selection Sunday, our fans were really upset that we’d gotten a nine seed. We were thinking a six or seven seed should be a possibility. So to be a nine seed and put into a bracket that if you win you play the very best team in the country next was something the fans were unhappy about.”

He has gone back and forth on the expansion of the NCAA tournament. The problem is there are just too many times when really good Valley teams don’t get a chance to do what Northern Iowa is doing. Teams like Wichita State, which had a couple of bad losses. but probably deserved to get in.

“I know personally, and can probably speak for most Panthers’ fan’s, if we were to have a 24 or 25 win season and get left out of the tournament I think we would be an upset fan base. Something has to change where the committee works harder to get two and three teams out of the Missouri Valley Conference. Or they have to expand the field to include more teams.

“Something isn’t just right because when you have UNI, Cornell and Saint Mary’s and Butler, teams that are so-called mid-majors doing what they’re doing to the big boys, there are more teams out there that could give similar results if they just got a chance to get in. If you leave it at 65 teams, those last five or six teams are always going to be disappointed. If you go to 96 teams the 97th and 98th teams are going to feel the same way. If we have to beat Kansas, or a George Mason beating UConn, to finally bring some recognition to our program, it just feels like you’ve going to give more teams the opportunity.

Northern Iowa has to battle for media coverage in Iowa with Iowa and Iowa State. and the neat thing is now there are Hawkeyes’ and Cyclones’ fans getting on the Panthers’ bandwagon. Panther-mania is absolutely running wild.

“I’ve been reading on our panthernation.com web site that people are struggling to get tickets to the game. Now they have found out that some are available. The point is…we’ve just never been here before and a lot of people are saying this might not happen again in this lifetime so I don’t want to miss it,” said Rima.

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