Has Iowa Turned The Corner?

[1977Hawkeye]

I've not called FM a terrible coach.

TD made the NCAA tournament three of his last four years, with two trips to the round of 32 and one to the Sweet 16. Then he went and built lowly Drake into a winner, letting Keno reap the rewards and parlay it into a job at Providence.

And some people called that "stale" and that the program was slipping.. hmm.

I don't care what anyone says - Davis was an excellent coach. Perfect, no. But as we've found, it's not so easy to get back to the level we were at on his watch, with or without Lute and Raveling's recruits.

Fran has flirted with that, and had some half-season flashes that maybe exceed it - like reaching #3 nationally in January a few years ago. Just gotta put it all together. Hopefully this is that year where the team finishes the season strong and doesn't get NWST'ed in the first round.

 

[PCHawk]

I've not called FM a terrible coach.

TD made the NCAA tournament three of his last four years, with two trips to the round of 32 and one to the Sweet 16. Then he went and built lowly Drake into a winner, letting Keno reap the rewards and parlay it into a job at Providence.

I know you haven't. My point was at the time, Davis was considered an average coach. Years later most consider him a good coach. Now Fran is doing close to what Davis did (about to make 4 tournaments in 6 years) and people say he's terrible. No matter where we are, some fans will downplay it and demand better. It would be the same even if we were where Wisconsin is.

 

[PCHawk]

And some people called that "stale" and that the program was slipping.. hmm.

I don't care what anyone says - Davis was an excellent coach. Perfect, no. But as we've found, it's not so easy to get back to the level we were at on his watch, with or without Lute and Raveling's recruits.

Fran has flirted with that, and had some half-season flashes that maybe exceed it - like reaching #3 nationally in January a few years ago. Just gotta put it all together. Hopefully this is that year where the team finishes the season strong and doesn't get NWST'ed in the first round.

I agree. Fran has actually been really close to being better than Davis over the last 6 years. That's why I stick behind him. He needed to tweak a few things and maybe get a little luckier and he will have this program ahead of where Davis had it.

Those 2 really bad classes set him back, but they happened when the program was still on really shakey ground. If that doesn't happen again and we can expect guys like Cook and Garza as out of state recruits every year, I think we will be bubble teams at worst from here on out.

 

[tksirius]

I’m still waiting for the “next level” above what Tom Davis did. It’s been 20 years.

You'd think Bowlsby and Tom could have sat down and discussed recruiting and collectively came up with a plan to improve in that area. Was Bowlsby more of a hands-off AD?

 

[FirstDownHawkeyes]

I've not called FM a terrible coach.

TD made the NCAA tournament three of his last four years, with two trips to the round of 32 and one to the Sweet 16. Then he went and built lowly Drake into a winner, letting Keno reap the rewards and parlay it into a job at Providence.

Davis got run out of town because he was a lazy recruiter that got outworked for in state talent by Roy Williams. Getting beat by Roy as a coach at KU is acceptable. Getting outworked is not, period. It’s a fireable offense.

Davis is fondly remembered because of the great 8 Raveling team (that blew a 20+ point half time lead vs UNLV BTW) he coached. That team was amazing and reached its heights because of Davis but it’s simply not representative of what he led as a program. Davis was known for a late season swoon and blowing big late leads too.

Fostering nostalgia for Davis yet continually bashing FM for similar results isn’t fair. (Not saying this specifically is you, Rob) Just imagine FMs system with Raveling’s players. Yeah, I thought so.

 

[HawkGold]

Davis got run out of town because he was a lazy recruiter that got outworked for in state talent by Roy Williams. Getting beat by Roy as a coach at KU is acceptable. Getting outworked is not, period. It’s a fireable offense.

Davis is fondly remembered because of the great 8 Raveling team (that blew a 20+ point half time lead vs UNLV BTW) he coached. That team was amazing and reached its heights because of Davis but it’s simply not representative of what he led as a program. Davis was known for a late season swoon and blowing big late leads too.

Fostering nostalgia for Davis yet continually bashing FM for similar results isn’t fair. (Not saying this specifically is you, Rob) Just imagine FMs system with Raveling’s players. Yeah, I thought so.

Wow sour grapes. That UNLV team was equally talented.

Davis was never an ass. FM system...no Defense most of the time?

Also, look what Tom did at Drake to set up Keno. Tom won 63 percent of games and FM 58 percent. That includes Tom's losing record at Drake. Neither set the world on fire.

This year's team if they can hold it together in finishing and then next year has the potential to be one of the all time Iowa favorite teams. They are easy to like.

 

[RobHowe]

Davis got run out of town because he was a lazy recruiter that got outworked for in state talent by Roy Williams. Getting beat by Roy as a coach at KU is acceptable. Getting outworked is not, period. It’s a fireable offense.

Davis is fondly remembered because of the great 8 Raveling team (that blew a 20+ point half time lead vs UNLV BTW) he coached. That team was amazing and reached its heights because of Davis but it’s simply not representative of what he led as a program. Davis was known for a late season swoon and blowing big late leads too.

Fostering nostalgia for Davis yet continually bashing FM for similar results isn’t fair. (Not saying this specifically is you, Rob) Just imagine FMs system with Raveling’s players. Yeah, I thought so.

TD got Dean Oliver and Ricky Davis and would have gotten Nick Collison, all towards the end of his time here. He got Range and Thompson from Galesburg. Range had an offer from Kentucky and was a Top 50 recruit.

Roy also pulled Harrison Barnes and Paige out of the state after TD was gone.

I think it’s unfair to label him a lazy recruiter.

 

[mopkins]

More than anything I need to see Fran:

A) not collapse down the stretch
B) make some noise in the BTT
C) sweet 16

None of those are remotely unreasonable...yet here we are.

 

[Northside Hawk]

You'd think Bowlsby and Tom could have sat down and discussed recruiting and collectively came up with a plan to improve in that area. Was Bowlsby more of a hands-off AD?

Bowlsby was smitten by the wave of thirty-something up and coming boy wonders of the mid to late nineties. Scott Skiles, Scott Brooks, Billy Donovan, Tommy Amaker, Quin Snyder, Tony Bennett and the one he ended up hiring, Steve Alford. I think at the time he envisioned Alford having a Coach K, Boeheim type run. By the time season three crashed and burned with a quick NIT exit, and was followed by two more NIT's in an extended down period for the B1G, it was fairly evident that wasnt going to happen.

 

[WindsorHawk]

I've not called FM a terrible coach.

TD made the NCAA tournament three of his last four years, with two trips to the round of 32 and one to the Sweet 16. Then he went and built lowly Drake into a winner, letting Keno reap the rewards and parlay it into a job at Providence.

I was a huge Tom Davis fan. So there is no Fran bias associated with this post. Below are the overall conference records and winning percentages for Tom and Fran in years 3 through 8 at Iowa.

Fran = 56-52 (51.9%)
Tom = 49-59 (45.4%)

Tom was 4-14 in Year 4 and 5-13 in Year 8. These were his only seasons with a losing conference record at Iowa.

Fran was 4-14 in Year 8. This is his only season with a losing conference record (excluding the first 2 when he was 4-14 and 8-10 respectively...and didn't have Raveling recruits on the roster).

Note - Tom's and Fran's Year 8 are eerily similar (and bad)...had no idea until starting this bit of research.

Tom then went 51-35 (59.3%) in his remaining 5 years at Iowa...far better winning percentage than the preceding 6 year period. If Fran is able to replicate this he will average a 12-8 conference record over the remainder of this season and the next 4.

 

[WindsorHawk]

TD got Dean Oliver and Ricky Davis and would have gotten Nick Collison, all towards the end of his time here. He got Range and Thompson from Galesburg. Range had an offer from Kentucky and was a Top 50 recruit.

Roy also pulled Harrison Barnes and Paige out of the state after TD was gone.

I think it’s unfair to label him a lazy recruiter.

I don’t know how many times I have posted this on here. We were not going to get Collison if Tom stayed. This is not speculation on my part.

 

[Northside Hawk]

TD got Dean Oliver and Ricky Davis and would have gotten Nick Collison, all towards the end of his time here. He got Range and Thompson from Galesburg. Range had an offer from Kentucky and was a Top 50 recruit.

Roy also pulled Harrison Barnes and Paige out of the state after TD was gone.

I think it’s unfair to label him a lazy recruiter.

Range had unlimited potential after his freshman year but, like Guy Rucker and Kingsbury a couple years earlier, he didn't always make the classroom a part of his daily routine.

That wasn't going to stand with Mr. High and Mighty Steve Alford who wasted little time bouncing Range and Rucker off the team.

In their place he brought in Rob Griffin, one of the all time forgotten Hawks, who combined Isiah Moss inconsistency with lackadaisical classroom effort and got himself dismissed from the team.

In came Reggie Evans, who came very close himself to not making it to the finish line academically. He was suspended for Ohio State late in his senior year and was almost dismissed. I remember Bobby Hansen, in that day's pregame show, saying he believed Evans had played his last game as a Hawkeye. Then there was Mike Henderson, who had some academic turbulence early on but eventually righted the ship. Or did Alford just turn the other way?

Which set the stage, and tumultuous exit from the stage, for Pierre Pierce. And nationwide scorn for the way Alford handled the situation.

I believe Alford got softer in time. Gradually allowing some of the same shenanigans that greased the skids for Davis in the first place. Until it really blew up in his face with Pierce, and how Steve handled it.

 

[tksirius]

I can't stand cherry picking.

 

[Adam]

TD got Dean Oliver and Ricky Davis and would have gotten Nick Collison, all towards the end of his time here. He got Range and Thompson from Galesburg. Range had an offer from Kentucky and was a Top 50 recruit.

Roy also pulled Harrison Barnes and Paige out of the state after TD was gone.

I think it’s unfair to label him a lazy recruiter.

If Davis had been allowed to "recruit" like Raveling did. Or been allowed to run an off the rails program he would of made us into blue bloods. He was hired to clean up the program and make it respectable and he did that with every fiber of his being.

Davis was definitely put out to pasture 5 years too soon, but Alford was the whole bag of chips as a coaching prospect and we went all in on a high potential bet. Hindsight affords us the advantage to measure that bet now as a loss.

 

[PCHawk]

Wow sour grapes. That UNLV team was equally talented.

Davis was never an ass. FM system...no Defense most of the time?

Also, look what Tom did at Drake to set up Keno. Tom won 63 percent of games and FM 58 percent. That includes Tom's losing record at Drake. Neither set the world on fire.

This year's team if they can hold it together in finishing and then next year has the potential to be one of the all time Iowa favorite teams. They are easy to like.

Fran has spent a good majority of his career building up terrible programs, and doing it well. Because of that, his career winning percentage will always look bad.

 

[Adam]

Fran has spent a good majority of his career building up terrible programs, and doing it well. Because of that, his career winning percentage will always look bad.

I believe Fran is a coach who knows how to build the foundation for a winning team. I believe he must be a well organized and competent individual at the administration tasks of running a program. These are pluses.

Fran is an offensive coach. His brand of defense is not designed to be Virginia defense. It is designed to keep an opponent under 75 while we score 80. For whatever reason Fran has struggled to maintain consistency from year to year primarily on the defensive end. It is probably an inevitable trade off of a coach that specializes in the offensive end.

My hope for Fran is, the need to break his tendency of man defense this year and learn and teach the multitudes of Zone defense will embolden Fran to challenge some of his other coaching philosophies. Things like substitutions, use of timeouts, use of set plays. These are in game philosophies that Fran himself can improve on through experience to allow his teams to eek out more wins in what will always be a deep league. My hope is that even veteran coaches can learn and grow.

 

[deanvogs]

I had been pretty vocal about how I thought Fran should have been fired after last season. I based this mostly on the fact I didn't believe there was any way that Fran could basically take the same team this year as last year and turn them into a NCAA team. I felt furthermore if Fran didn't make the NCAA's this year, there was NO WAY that he would make it next year after losing Baer and Cook from a team that couldn't make the NCAA's. Basically I felt he would miss the NCAA"s 3 and then 4 years in a row. Welp I was totally wrong, and Fran has done exactly what I didn't think he could do, and that was bounce back this year to be a NCAA team. It would be ridiculous to call for the head of a coach who made 4 out of the last 6 NCAA tournaments like Fran will be after this year.

 

[InGoodCo]

Really didn't expect this one from you @InGoodCo. I mean we are talking about a team that won 4 conference games last year and wasn't even close to making the NIT. This year is most definitely "turning the corner", as the path this program was on, just a few months ago looked bleak and dire, and even getting a NCAA birth looked unrealistic.

I think they’ve turned a corner on last season. So I guess I should clarify, I just want the staff to reach an accomplishment that was something more tangible before I can say the program as a whole has reached a turning point.

 

[FirstDownHawkeyes]

I was a huge Tom Davis fan. So there is no Fran bias associated with this post. Below are the overall conference records and winning percentages for Tom and Fran in years 3 through 8 at Iowa.

Fran = 56-52 (51.9%)
Tom = 49-59 (45.4%)

Tom was 4-14 in Year 4 and 5-13 in Year 8. These were his only seasons with a losing conference record at Iowa.

Fran was 4-14 in Year 8. This is his only season with a losing conference record (excluding the first 2 when he was 4-14 and 8-10 respectively...and didn't have Raveling recruits on the roster).

Note - Tom's and Fran's Year 8 are eerily similar (and bad)...had no idea until starting this bit of research.

Tom then went 51-35 (59.3%) in his remaining 5 years at Iowa...far better winning percentage than the preceding 6 year period. If Fran is able to replicate this he will average a 12-8 conference record over the remainder of this season and the next 4.

Bottom line is some of the reverence for Tom Davis is nostalgic memory. He wasn’t as good as he is now remembered and FM isn’t as bad compared to Tom Davis as many are reporting that he is. The buzz on campus in the 1990s when I was there was that Davis got out worked by Roy Williams for the highest level local recruits. Roy was at all the games. Tom never was. When FM makes the second weekend he will have done all that TD did. I like both TD and FM. I just think FM hasn’t been treated fairly when compared to TD.

 

[HawkGold]

I had been pretty vocal about how I thought Fran should have been fired after last season. I based this mostly on the fact I didn't believe there was any way that Fran could basically take the same team this year as last year and turn them into a NCAA team. I felt furthermore if Fran didn't make the NCAA's this year, there was NO WAY that he would make it next year after losing Baer and Cook from a team that couldn't make the NCAA's. Basically I felt he would miss the NCAA"s 3 and then 4 years in a row. Welp I was totally wrong, and Fran has done exactly what I didn't think he could do, and that was bounce back this year to be a NCAA team. It would be ridiculous to call for the head of a coach who made 4 out of the last 6 NCAA tournaments like Fran will be after this year.

In fairness to you, Fran's teams were lacking in certain fundamentals. I figured they'd be close to 500 this year based on age. They've surpassed that. Next year (a year ago), thought they might be something between average and champs, but not champs. Still the fundamentals weren't there. Something has changed and it's not just Fran. Maybe it's J BO's leadership? J Bo has always had strong fundamentals. He just couldn't keep up the D. As I'm writing, I'm convincing myself it's the JW factor. The kids has had some good training and maybe it's robbing off on all including the coach.