The Ballad of Dr. Tom

Iowa fans point to Tom Davis' ouster as the original sin. Why do they seem so intent on doing it again?

In 1998, Iowa let Tom Davis go.

Dr. Tom Davis wasn’t fired by Iowa. A firing would take some sort of immediate justification, a bottoming-out that would require urgent change, of which there was none. Davis, who was in his thirteenth season as Iowa’s head coach, had won 20 games the year before. He’d won 20 or more games in the three seasons before that, and five times prior to those years. He would go on to win 20 games in his final season as head coach at Iowa, despite being informed on April 2 of the previous year by Bob Bowlsby that his expiring contract would not be renewed.

The details of why Bob Bowlsby declined to renew Davis’ contract are old but far from obscure. In 1997-98, Davis’ Hawkeyes had started the season in the AP top 10, fueled by a hyped freshman backcourt of Dean Oliver and Ricky Davis and a bunch of returning production in the frontcourt. They mowed through Davis’ usual selection of nonconference cannon fodder, but dropped a game at UNI, a decade before that was even moderately acceptable. Even so, Iowa was 10th in the nation entering mid-January, before losing 4 out of 5, falling entirely out of the polls for good. The Hawkeyes dropped their first-round game at the first-ever Big Ten tournament to Michigan, and despite having gone 20-11, and 9-7 in the Big Ten, Iowa was left out of the NCAA Tournament. They lost by seven at home to Georgia in the NIT first round; three weeks later, Bowlsby informed Davis he would get one last season before Iowa went another direction.

That Davis was let go in this way has been treated as the original sin of Iowa fandom. It has been the underlying justification for endless extensions to Kirk Ferentz, Fran McCaffery, Lisa Bluder, and Tom Brands. These histories rely in large part on what happened after Bowlsby made his announcement: Davis, in a lame duck season with a senior-heavy roster, took Iowa to the 1999 NCAA Tournament as a 5 seed, upset Arkansas in the second round to make the Sweet 16, then gave eventual NCAA Champion a real run before bowing out. Iowa hired Steve Alford, who was a slow-moving personality disaster, and then Todd Lickliter, and the cratering that could have justified Davis’ firing finally came to Iowa Basketball.

But here’s the thing: That 1998-99 Iowa team had an identical profile to the one before it with two key exceptions. Davis’ last team also finished 20-11 and 9-7 in the Big Ten. They had a bizarre nonconference loss to a Missouri Valley team (this time, Creighton), a three-game January losing streak, and a first-round loss at the Big Ten Tournament. The two exceptions: Iowa was unranked until it upset Kansas at Allen Fieldhouse in December, which gave them the profile to make the NCAA Tournament, and Iowa won two games at that Tournament. The previous squad had started the season as a Final Four contender and missed the NCAA Tournament entirely. The 1998-99 team had no preseason buzz, and went to the Sweet 16. It was merely a matter of expectations.