Lame Duck

If a team falls to Minnesota and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Back in the year 2000, we were going through an election cycle that didn’t involve the sitting president. Bill Clinton was term limited, his vice president was running for his office, and everyone kind of just stopped paying attention to what was happening at the White House.

For that year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Clinton recorded a video joking about how nobody was there anymore and he had nothing to do but answer the phones, mow the lawn and play Battleship with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs¹.

There had been modest accomplishments in the previous eight years, and Clinton was relatively popular, but the writing was on the wall. His tenure was at an end, and rather than going out on a bang, it was ending with a whimper that nobody was there to hear.

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On January 11, Iowa pummeled Indiana 85-60, a win that came on the heels of an overtime victory over a hot Nebraska team. At 3-2 in the conference and a no. 39 ranking in Kenpom, things were trending up. It was the highest the Hawkeyes had been rated at this point in the calendar since the Keegan Murray-led Big Ten Tournament title season in 2021-22.

And then the car ran off the cliff. Iowa dropped a pair of games in California last week by a total of 34 points against a decent UCLA team and less-than-decent USC squad. They followed that up with a five-point loss to the truly putrid Minnesota Golden Gophers, a team featuring five players shooting less than 55 percent from the free throw line. Iowa was down by 17 in the second half of that game before launching a comeback that started too late and scored too few. The Hawkeyes have fallen to 60th in Kenpom; they haven’t been that low since the 14-win 2017-18 campaign. Remember that one? Neither do I.

Iowa has gotten by for years without much for defense, but the new wrinkle in the last two seasons is coupling that with a lack of rebounding. For the first thirteen seasons of McCaffery’s tenure, Iowa never finished lower than 143rd nationally in offensive rebounding, and were in the national top 100 eleven times. Last year, the Hawkeyes were 232nd. This year, they’re 304th. Defensively, Iowa is 299th nationally in effective field goal percentage allowed and 321st in two-point field goal percentage allowed. When combined with one out of every three opponent misses rebounded by the opponent (itself 311th in the country), we have a real chicken-or-egg scenario: Are opponents making a ton of two-point shots because they get so many rebounds near the rim, or are opponents getting such a high rebound percentage because there are so few rebounds to be had? Regardless, it’s an unsustainable model of the game, even when the Hawkeyes are fifth nationally in effective field goal percentage as they are now.

Coach Fran McCaffery’s newfound Zen coaching style continues to veer toward ‘walking comatose,’ his in-game strategy little more than his shooters continue to shoot and Owen Freeman doing what he can against waves of opposing forwards coming at him like Verdun. The shortcomings of the roster — essentially Freeman and a five-out group of small forwards that can’t play five-out with the team’s best player on the floor — become obvious the second McCaffery goes to his bench. McCaffery made Drew Thelwell a starter a month ago, coupled with Brock Harding in the starting backcourt. As a result, Iowa now has zero ballhandlers AND zero viable centers on the bench. It’s just a parade of 6’7” guys, related to other guys who played for Iowa in the past or play for Iowa now.

Iowa’s catastrophic California Adventure has done nothing to kickstart already-stagnant local interest in this program. The Hawkeyes’ triumphant return to Carver Hawkeye Arena Tuesday night was played in front of about 5,000 fans and nearly-empty student section.

This is hardly the first time that Iowa has had lackluster turnout on a cold weeknight, but those typically come with snow measured in inches and wind speeds approaching 25. That wasn’t the case Tuesday. It was simply cold, as it could be any January night in Iowa City. Temps in the single digits isn’t usually enough to keep fans away, especially when the opponent is a hated border rival and victory looks probable.

The sad reality is that McCaffery’s tenure has probably run its course. The fans seem to know it. The team seems to know it. Frankly, Fran seems to know it.

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Coaching tenures have a shelf life, and while Iowa coaching tenures tend to stay on the shelf longer than just about anyone, even Hawkeye fans have to clear some space every once in a while.

The thing that made Dr. Tom Davis’ ouster in 1998 so meaningful to future Hawkeye fans was what his final team accomplished. Here was a coach who won at a consistent rate, but had failed for a decade to win a Big Ten title or make any noise in the NCAA Tournament, taking a ragtag bunch of kids from Iowa and Illinois — Dean Oliver (Mason City), J.R Koch (Peoria, Ill.), Jess Settles (Winfield), Kent McCausland (Waterloo), Joey Range (Galesburg, Ill.) and Jacob Jaacks (Cedar Rapids) — to the Sweet 16 with a win over mighty Arkansas. The very team that was rejected as insufficient by Bob Bowlsby and a significant portion of the fan base achieved the goal that had so often been cited as the reason Davis was not being retained. It was a finger in the eye of the haters, a middle finger to everyone who had signed on for Steve Alford’s ascension.

Fran McCaffery took this program over at an all-time low, and brought it back to respectability. Under his watch, Iowa made eight NCAA Tournament appearances; in the previous two regimes, there had been only three berths (and one win) in eleven years. From 2020 through 2022, he guided his squad to a Big Ten Tournament title, a Naismith Award winner and two Big Ten Player of the Year Awards; frankly, Iowa should have swept both awards all three seasons. This was a basketball program on the brink, and Fran has to be commended for bringing it back to relevance.

Still, McCaffery draws the same criticism as Davis when it comes to the NCAA Tournament, and that cannot be ignored. It would be poetic justice for him to take this team — his own group of kids from Iowa and Illinois — on a run through the NCAA Tournament. But the last week of results has shown that is not meant to be. If it can’t end with poetic justice, and if those last days are played to an empty arena rather than rapturous adulation, it’s probably time that it simply ends, with a whimper heard by dozens.

1. The Kevin Spacey cameo didn’t age particularly well.