Iowa Bball

I try not to be too much of a homer, and write excessively about the Minnesota Vikings or Iowa Hawkeyes. This post, however, is all about the Hawkeyes basketball team...

In 1999, i started college at the University of Iowa. Iowa had just hired new coaches for both its football and men's basketball teams. In football, they hired Kirk Ferentz, who at the time, was an unpopular hire. Hawkeye nation wanted Bob Stoops (who turned out to be a pretty good coach for Oklahoma). They got Ferentz, who in retrospect turned out to be a pretty good coach. Despite the last two years struggles by the football team, Captain Kirk has put together quite probably the greatest run by an Iowa football team ever.

On the flip side, the basketball team hired Steve Alford, a young up and comer fresh off a Sweet 16 run with Southwest Missouri State. Alford was considered one of the hot coaching prospects in the country, and got a lot of looks from big programs. When Iowa landed him, it was considered a big-time hire.

I remember sitting in the student section at an Iowa football game, in the middle of a 1-10 first season under Ferentz, when they brought out Alford for an interview on the sideline right in front of the student section. He received one of the biggest and longest standing ovations i've ever seen, long before he had ever coached a game. When he opened that season later in the month with a win over defending national champion UConn, Alford was the toast of the town. It was a short lived toast.

7 years later, despite seeing some of the best talent wonder through Iowa City since the BJ Armstrong, Roy Marble, and Ed Horton days, the Hawkeye basketball team was a perennial underachiever. The final straw, despite Alford lasting one more year, may have come in the 2005-2006 season when a senior-laden team, which had played well enough throughout the season to garner a #3 seed in the NCAA Tournament, lost in the first round on a last second shot to Northwestern State.

Those Iowa teams, along with off the court troubles (Pierre Pierce anyone?), were known for one thing by anyone who watched them consistently: Bad coaching. Whether it be bad defensive positioning, bad offensive sets, or lack of discipline, Alford was never known as a good in-game coach.

And nothing personified this better than their inability to break a press. I had season tickets for two years while I was in college, watched them religiously the other three years i lived in Iowa City, and watched them sporadically after i moved away. By that point, I couldn't bear to watch them anymore. Any team that played the Hawkeyes needed to have only one blueprint for success: Play a full-court press. It did not matter if the Iowa team had four senior starters or three freshman starters, under Alford they had a complete inability to break a press. Anytime a team played a press, Iowa looked like a bunch of 4th graders. Watching it made me want to ram my head into a wall; it shouldn't be that hard. Spread the floor, find the open man, advance the ball. It seems like a simple concept.

Yet no matter how many times or how many years other teams did this to Iowa, they never seemed to learn. After a while, you could only point to one thing: Bad coaching. Alford came in to Iowa as a supposed renown recruiter, but his coaching was suspect at best. When he feebly left Iowa to go to New Mexico (New Mexico!), Alford was known as a so-so recruiter and a bad coach.

That leads me to new Iowa coach Todd Lickliter. Lickliter's reputation was as a tough defensive coach and systematic offensive scheme, albeit with a fair amount of three-pointers launched. Through 4 games this year (3 of which i've been able to watch, thanks to the wonder that is the Big Ten Network), Lickliter's Iowa's teams have been just that: Tough defensively, systematic offensively, and with a propensity to shoot a fair amount of 3's. They haven't allowed a team to reach 50 points yet, but they haven't exactly been lighting up the scoreboard themselves.

But until tonight, i still wasn't sure about Lickliter's ability to coach. That is, until late in the 2nd half against U. of Maryland Eastern Shore, when that team started pressing Iowa because they were behind. Faced with a full-court press, this year's Iowa team did something i have not seen since the Tom Davis years: They broke it with ease. Not only did they break the press, but they broke it quickly, they broke it with good spacing, they broke it with sharp passes, and they broke it so well it led to layups and dunks. And as i watched, all i could think about was how well-coached this team looked.

I don't know how well this Iowa team will do. They are very young, and very green. They are playing in what is looking to be a very tough Big Ten Conference this year. And they are playing short-handed at the moment with their starting point guard Tony Freeman out with a broken wrist for the next month. But from what i have seen so far this year, the future looks bright. And unlike 8 years ago, when that future looked bright because of good players, this time it looks bright because of good coaching.

And i think that sets up the program for more success...