Out in the 1st or 2nd round no matter what. winning the Big Ten tournament last season was fun and cool but hurt us more then helped , it didn’t help land the big we sorely needed, which was too bad, we’ll still be pretty good I think but got get that nil thing going strong if they want to compete going forward.
Fun to talk about things but the end result is
- Thread starter Nurman
- Start date
Starting off Father's Day strong by telling us how winning the Big Ten Tournament was worse than not winning it. Well played. There is very little correlation between winning your conference tournament and losing/winning in the NCAA tournament. Richmond also won its conference tournament.
Listen, I was as disappointed as anyone (well, probably not the players and coaches) about the debacle against Richmond. The reason Iowa didn't get a good big man in the transfer portal was due to NIL money, not because Iowa lost to Richmond. Period. Iowa is working to get the NIL collective up and going, but it is what it is.
Sad state of affairs that we’re in when folks say the reason we didn’t get a player is due to lack of money.
That's different than 30/40/50 years ago how?
At least now it's out in the open and everyone knows what they're up against and how to change it.
Iowa was picked to finish 9th in the preseason. They finished tied for 4th and win the B1G tournament IN INDIANA by beating INDIANA and PURDUE on consecutive days. If that isn't exceeding expectations for you, you need a reality check.
Iowa will make the Sweet Sixteen in the next 2 years. My bold prediction.
😉
This is a good post.
I too think, and have said in a prior post, that IA will breakthrough in the NCAA tournament in the not too distant future. Something like Bowen’s Jr year, Payton Sr, Freeman So, Perkins Covid year???, Pryce So (hopefully), Jack M Fr year, with others TBD is my thought.
Man, I do hope you are right. Fran needs to get past the second-round hurdle.
Great points about the portal this year, but what is the reason for getting no true post help last off season? (Remember folks, it is ok to admit your favorite team/coach has shortcomings...)
Fran has always been in on great undervalued kids early on, as well as top players early on. He needs to land them to get to the next level. End of story. Hard stop.
Freeman is a great start to the next class. The class has to finish strong, or we'll be having this same discussion about yet another premature exit in the NCAA tournament.
Fitz,
Of course Fran is not a perfect coach. But, when it came to the transfer portal and trying to find a big, Fran was in on several of them.
I think NIL money was a big (no pun intended), deciding factor on why Fran struck out each and every time. Fran did not have an Iowa NIL booster contacting the kids he was after; the competing schools, from the accounts I saw, did.
Expect 4 star Pryce Sandfort to join Owen Freeman in the 2023 class. Will it take lucrative NIL deals to fill the likely 3 other openings that Iowa will have? Hopefully not.
I'm talking about going INTO the 21-22 season. No Luka and Fran knows he needs a big who can be a be help ..... He gets a decent but out of position Rebracca.
He just is not good at the portal folks. He contacts the top players, or many of them, be just can't close. This year it was due to NIL issues, sure, but the years before?.... I will not fault him for lack of success in the portal this year and going forward (in this new NIL world), but he underperformed in all things portal players since the portal has been around.
So that means his normal recruiting needs to take the step if he can't close on portal players.
The portal is relatively new. McC has done pretty well considering that Iowa mostly recruits hs kids. The big question for me is how will the portal affect Iowa and player retention. Iowa lost CJ basically because of financial reasons (regardless of what you may believe, I can guarantee that there were financial incentives for the transfer!) Will this happen mire frequently now that players will be recruited with NIL money?
Not losing players to the portal > getting a transfer from the portal.
Is that going to be our new excuse? Not like Fran was lighting it up in recruiting pre-NIL.
Yeah, it's not like Iowa has had a NPOY candidate the last 3 years and has another on the roster. It's not like Iowa has had a player leading the NATION in scoring at some point each of the last 3 years. Right?
😉
I have been as critical of Fran as most anyone. I am more than willing to criticize an Iowa coach, including Fran. I'm just not in the "Fire Fran" crowd, which a certain segment of the fan base has had enough and thinks he should go. I'm not in that camp. if Iowa were to fire a coach who has made the NCAA tournament 4 straight years (the 2020 team was comfortably in before COVID cancelled), they would be the laughingstock of college hoops and unable to hire anyone beyond a high school coach.
They recruited a post last year, Rebraca. I can't remember who, but they didn't get another big guy before landing Rebraca. My guess is Fran thought Rebraca would be better than he was this year. Rebraca had other Power 5 offers on transferring.
I'm not disagreeing that it would help if Fran landed more highly ranked guys. They tend to be good. And water is wet. They have landed some. More would be better.
well no duh, Fran isn't even remotely on the hot seat. There is no credible "fire fran" movement because it takes a few years of being below 0.500 in B1G for any fire fran momentum to build.
The last 2 years have been pretty good but absent any NCAA tourney success. If one looks over the entire Fran 12 year term...some Fran fans seem to view it as the golden age of Iowa B-ball and some see it as kind of meh for the most part. CMAC is either the greatest non-scoring role player in history of Basketball or just the privileged son of a coach that plays him over better players. PMAC is somewhere in between triumphant cancer survivor on cusp of super stardom, or a guy that doesn't play much defense, is softer than charmin, and is not an efficient scorer.
So true Logic. People seem to gravitate toward either being a Fran fan-boy and everything is the best ever and wanting him run out if he loses 2 games in a row during the conference season.
You enapsulated things pretty well. Fran is a good coach. I don't think any reasonable person could disagree. Excels at getting huge output from under-valued/under recruited players. The history of guys like Aaron White, Keeg. Murray, Garza, to an extent Dev Marble and now Kr. Murray becoming all Big-10 caliber players after not being highly recruited is quite remarkable. At the same time, they just don't value defense as much as other teams do that tend to go farther in the NCAA tournament. Both things can be true.
Games are more enjoyable when keeping those things in mind. This year's team has the potential to be quite good. Definitely could be in the NCAA tournament once again. If they do, that would be 5 straight years of NCAA tournament (2020 the team was in) quality basketball, which seemed like a pipe dream when Fran was hired. When he came in, Iowa had been to the tournament 3 times in the prior 11 years. That is getting into territory where the only Big 10 teams worse are Nebraska, Northwestern and maybe Penn State. In the last 9 years (marking Fran's first NCAA team at Iowa, Iowa has been in the tournament 7 if those years (if you could 2020). That is good. If the 2022-23 team gets in, that is 8 times in a 10 year period. Of course, getting past the first weekend is Fran's white whale, but one would think that just getting in that many times they are bound to get to the Sweet 16. But it's Iowa basketball, so heartbreak is the way of life.
Iowa b-ball provides relatively good entertainment.
The thing that's really lacking is NCAA tourney performance.
The lack of any significant tourney success, particularly the flops that were the past two trips, weighs heavy.
NCAA tourney performance has always been my primary measure of a season.
The thing that's really lacking is NCAA tourney performance.
The lack of any significant tourney success, particularly the flops that were the past two trips, weighs heavy.
NCAA tourney performance has always been my primary measure of a season.
No one would even consider firing a coach who just won the B1G tournament and had National player of the year finalists for the past 3 years. What is wrong with some of you? Yeah I know everyone wants some ncaa tourney wins too. Have a little faith. We are rolling right now and despite what many think, our recruiting is very good.
well, there's a loud contingent that wants our football coach fired after making it to the Big 10 championship game, so that's kind of what you get on here.
The last 2 NCAA tournaments have been failures. However, most of November-March the last two years have been pretty enjoyable as a Hawkeye basketball fan. 2021-22 the last month of the regular season and then the Big Ten tournament was great. Before that spending a big chunk of the 2020-21 season in the top 10 was also fun.
Fran is not above being criticized and some fans are going to do that with anything short of a national championship. As a lifelong fan, the part of the program I am most impressed with now is the consistency it has built the last four years and hopefully continues this year. It can't be easy to compete in the Big Ten and have a winning record. Every program is paying a head coach big money to get a job done. Iowa is in good shape for next season and despite the landscape of college basketball with free transfers and NIL Fran has maintained a competitive and fairly deep roster.
In my opinion it would take 2 or 3 consecutive non-NCAA seasons to start real talk of Fran being on the hot seat.
Fran is not above being criticized and some fans are going to do that with anything short of a national championship. As a lifelong fan, the part of the program I am most impressed with now is the consistency it has built the last four years and hopefully continues this year. It can't be easy to compete in the Big Ten and have a winning record. Every program is paying a head coach big money to get a job done. Iowa is in good shape for next season and despite the landscape of college basketball with free transfers and NIL Fran has maintained a competitive and fairly deep roster.
In my opinion it would take 2 or 3 consecutive non-NCAA seasons to start real talk of Fran being on the hot seat.
The portal is not a restaurant menu. You can't just choose who you want and have them delivered to your team. Also the portal is 3 years old. If a coach does well in the portal I'd argue they are doing fairly poorly in regular recruiting. Pretty hard to have it both ways.
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