Apparently Fran and especially Margaret could be assholes. Whatever. People deserve to be called out for that. But I also really appreciate Fran for pulling the program out of the shitter and initially getting fans all fired up about Iowa basketball again. It was a good marriage that ran its course. Let's drop all the not from here, hated it here, East Coast, blah, blah, blah. People everywhere are assholes at times. And Margaret is a Midwest gal anyway.
And one thing important to remember - his players absolutely love him. All those guys we cheered for - they love Fran, still do. I'm not gonna try to defend any McCaffery here, just pointing that out.
I don't think we really learned anything new about Fran last week. And most people had heard some of the Margaret stuff before.
My biggest takeaway was how completely inept Barta truly was. It was his job to manage coaches. And yet you had a situation where there was apparently open animosity with the head coach and the official play by play announcer for the university. How was that allowed to fester for so long? The 2018 hot mic incident was probably the right time for Barta to step in and transition Dolphin off of basketball coverage. Or if you decide he's your radio guy still, you ensure the air is cleared and there isn't any kind of lingering issues. That clearly didn't happen.
And it completely blows my mind that Margaret was allowed to continue to attend any type of press conference or post game session. (Really any official event besides games). The university - again, hello Barta - needed to step in after the first couple times she berated or heckled journalists. That's a horrible, embarrassing look for the university. Barta needed to correct that behavior early on - instead he enabled it. It seems unlikely Fran would have quit over that, and if he did, it wouldn't have mattered.
I also would have enjoyed learning about these things when they happened. I understand that perhaps not all of it was news, but Margaret heckling journalists during public events, or Fran refusing to allow the radio team to travel or eat with the basketball team certainly seems worthy of a little inquiry on the part of the media, including an interview with Barta about his thoughts on the issue. But we never got that from anyone in the media.
Finally, some of the CC takes are absurd (at best). She didn't come out on social media and cheer the men's team on during the elite 8 run? Have we tallied up all the other former Hawkeye greats who didn't? There is a lot of projection going on for a social media non-action.
Until she comes out and says something negative about the university, can we just leave her out of this? She and Nile Kinnick are the two Hawks on the mountain top, and only one of them is still alive. She and Steph Curry have sold more jerseys in the world than anyone the last couple years. It's still hard to wrap our minds around the phenomenon that is Caitlin Clark. She is an Iowa girl, born and raised. She has done nothing but represent the state and the university of Iowa in an amazing way. She is a fierce competitor, a bad ass, and bleeds black and gold. Nobody has done more - ever - to raise the profile of the university of Iowa or the Iowa Hawkeyes than Caitlin Clark. No one.
