Payoffs
In a college sports world where everything is for sale and being a fan is expensive, the Iowa women's basketball team keeps delivering for its investors
I was walking back across Melrose to my car. It was dark outside. I had left a few minutes early, so as I crossed Melrose into the parking lot, I was weirdly walking alone among the 70,000 people still present in the Zip code. And so there, in Lot 49, I let it all out — the jubilation, the release of anger and frustration, the pure satisfaction of the moment — in a sound that I can only compare to Josh Lyman leaving a polling place.
The day was November 4, 2017, Toren Young would put the finishing score on Ohio State a few moments later, and many of those 70,000 people would be on the field of Kinnick Stadium in a few minutes. Iowa’s 55-24 win over OSU that day would ring in the annals of social media1 for nearly a decade.
Iowa didn’t capitalize on the momentum of the win; the following week, Iowa’s newfound chariot of an offense turned back into a pumpkin in a 38-14 loss to Wisconsin where the only scores were two pick-sixes. A loss to Purdue the following week guaranteed a losing record in the Big Ten.
The fact remains that it’s been nearly a decade since that game. Since then, the number of times Iowa football did something that would provide even a fraction of the euphoria of that post-OSU moment are few and far between. There was some satisfaction in ending Minnesota’s undefeated season in 2019, but Iowa entered that game as a favorite. Curbstomping USC in the 2019 Holiday Bowl was fun, but it was a four-loss Trojan squad. The 2021 season opened with wins over No. 17 Indiana and No. 9 Iowa State, catapulting Iowa to the national top five by mid-October; the win against No. 4 Penn State on October 9 seemed monumental. But (a) the exultation over the win was muted by the way it went down, with Penn State’s quarterback leaving the game while the Nittany Lions were in total control, and the injury turned the whole game around, and (b) that Indiana team ended up 2-10 on the season, Iowa State was barely over .500, Penn State went into a tailspin after the loss, and Iowa ended up 10-4 with a 39-point loss to Michigan in the Big Ten Championship Game. In the three years following that game, Iowa is 0-9 against ranked opponents, losing by an average margin of nearly 25 points.
Obviously, Iowa football still packs the stands at Kinnick Stadium seven Saturdays each fall. The same can’t be said for Iowa men’s basketball, which has fallen into a pit of indifference in the last few years. It looks unlikely that this Hawkeye squad makes it into the NCAA Tournament for a second consecutive year; the last team to make the Tournament, the 2022-23 squad, defeated exactly one team in the Kenpom Top 25 en route to a 19-13 record and first-round exit. Much like with football, it’s hard to locate a time that the program last paid off its fans. There was the 2022 Big Ten Tournament title, an extraordinary run of form for a team that went 8-2 down the stretch, but the memories of that championship are always tempered by the first-round upset loss to Richmond in the NCAA's the following week. The 2020-21 team was vexed by Oregon and its Covid-related first-round bye, the 2019-20 team having its run stopped altogether by the pandemic. Iowa hasn’t beaten a top 10 opponent in men’s basketball since February 2020, when they knocked off Ohio State. Of course, Fran McCaffery’s failure to make the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament will be in the first paragraph of his career obituary, should it end this spring. If one were looking for the last time that Iowa men’s basketball paid off its fans for their support, it may be the 2000 win over Kansas, or Dr. Tom’s final Sweet Sixteen trip in 1999. We’re a quarter-century removed from those games.
Iowa Wrestling isn’t that far removed from its heightened standard of success — the program won an NCAA Championship in 2021, and would have been a favorite in 2020 had the pandemic not canceled the NCAA championships. But the program seems to be deeply behind Penn State and finished fifth at the NCAAs last year. Iowa Baseball was poised for a breakout season last year, only to finish 31-23 overall and 14-10 in the Big Ten, missing the NCAA Tournament entirely.
Fandom is a weird concept, and fandom at the collegiate level is especially strange. On the one hand, it’s maybe the easiest to comprehend, given that Iowa is the alma mater for so many of those who support it. On the other hand, it requires being a fan in a multitude of sports played year-round; a fan of the Chicago Cubs may not like the Bears or the Bulls, and wouldn’t need to justify that. But an Iowa fan is largely an Iowa fan, no matter the activity.
Still, there are magnitudes of support, and one need only look at Carver Hawkeye Arena for a men’s basketball game in comparison to what we saw Sunday afternoon when the women took the floor.
Iowa women’s basketball is squarely on the NCAA Tournament bubble, or at least was before yesterday’s upset victory over No. 4 USC. Given that the greatest player in program history graduated and the head coach retired, it’s an understandable step back from the highs of the previous two seasons, but it’s been a modest disappointment nonetheless. And yet, every seat in Carver Hawkeye Arena was full Sunday. Television announcers said that students were in line five hours before tipoff. Tickets on the open market were going for more than $200.
How did Iowa women’s basketball build this thing that the men’s program has struggled to replicate? They did it by repeatedly paying off those fans with the equivalent of Iowa 55, Ohio State 24. Since the 2022 Tournament loss to Creighton, it’s been nothing but payoffs:
There was the Caitlin Clark buzzer beater against Indiana in 2023, which capped a 15-3 Big Ten campaign, and led to a Big Ten Tournament title and Final Four run.
The South Carolina upset win in the 2023 NCAAs is arguably the biggest win in the history of Iowa Athletics, and was enough of an underdog story to make Iowa a national darling.
Clark returned for another 15-3 Big Ten season, another Big Ten Tournament title, and another Final Four run with the catharsis of defeating comic book villain LSU and perennial powerhouse UConn.
Iowa handled the coaching transition flawlessly, and looks poised to catapult into the national elite off the momentum of those two seasons and the program that Bluder, Jensen, Clark and those teams built.
This program continues to deliver for its fans; even when the season hasn’t gone according to plan, they still absorb the enthusiasm of 15,000 in attendance and deliver a performance to be remembered. It’s screaming in a Melrose Avenue parking lot, over and over again.
The cost of college fandom only increases with each year. There are booster club donations, and NIL collective donations, and seat license fees, and the cost of the tickets themselves. At every turn, there’s a hand out asking for your money, or your time, or just your support. It gets exhausting quickly. That investment pays off with wins and trophies, with championships and postseason appearances, the tangible signs of success that we can all point to. But it also pays off with moments like Sunday afternoon, whether you were in attendance or watching at home. When those moments become few and far between, fans reassess their level of commitment, which is when you see empty seats and transferring players. But if any of Iowa’s programs need to be reminded of how to rebuild that support, they need to look no further than Iowa women’s hoops.
I quit Twitter on May 5, 2024 just to make the joke.
I will say while I understand the apathy and frustration of fans toward Iowa men's basketball, its level and vitriol seems much greater than it should be given the relative quality of the program. I suppose it is a combination of losing a generation of fans thanks to the Alford-then-Lickliter cratering, Fran's often caustic personality, the dreaded "N" (nepotism) word, and of course the NCAA tournament flameouts.
I am just a huge lover of college basketball in general, so the fact thousands and thousands prefer to find something better to do on cold Iowa nights than go watch a Big 10 basketball game will never really make sense to me.
I hope there is a resurgence of sorts when the McCaffery era ends. As we saw on Sunday with the women, when a basketball team is cooking, Carver can be a place of joy and rapture. I desperately want to experience that again with the men's program. Perhaps my all-time favorite sports memory was being in attendance when Iowa beat Michigan's vaunted "Fab 5" the week after Chris Street's tragic death. Goosebumps still, two-plus decades later remembering it.
Absolutely loved this read -- great stuff, man.