Bowlesby DID fire the guy and wanted to just pay him off for his final year. It was Davis who went to the University President and begged to be allowed to coach his final year. For the sake of saving paying Davis out, the decision to allow him to finish his contract, is what cost the school so heavily for years to come. Davis knew BEFORE he coached his final year that he was gone. Davis thought that he was more powerful that Bowlesby and was insubordinate to Bowlesby's requests regarding the recruitment of Joey Range and Davis refused to upgrade the non conference schedule. Davis was content with scheduling cupcakes to get his non conference wins to go with a .500 conference schedule to get into the NCAA's. The only big names that he played were in Holiday Tournaments. SOS was beginning to be recognized by the NCAA committees and Bowlesby warned Davis. Davis ignored him and we were excluded one year because of that. In fact if you go back, you'd find that many of Davis's selections might not make the grade now. Now, not only did Iowa lose a whole recruiting year, Davis did not follow up on keeping Guy Rucker eligible so he was gone due to paperwork, not grades so Iowa had very little left over the following year.
You are right. I mis spoke. He had Marble who was the #1 career scorer, B.J, who was the # 3 career scorer at the time and he had Horton who finished as the #6 career scorer. My bad, but I think that you get the point that he had arguably the best roster ever inherited by a Iowa coach. Oh yea, I forgot Jeff Moe who was on Davis's first three teams with Roy, B.J. and Ed . Moe , at the end of those three guy's career was ranked number 8 on the career scoring list , so for three years Davis had 4 players who would end their careers in the top 10.
