Sunday marked six years since Iowa basketball hired Fran McCaffery as its head coach.
That time span is in many ways reminiscent of another Hawkeye coaching great; Tom Davis. If McCaffery can replicate his recent success over the same duration of tenure that Davis had, he could finish ahead of Davis.
When Iowa hired Davis in 1986, he replaced George Raveling, who had spent the last three years as the head man for the Hawkeyes. Iowa qualified for the NCAA tournament, was ranked in the AP Top 25 and reached 20 wins in both of Raveling’s final two seasons. At least one Hawkeye was drafted into the National Basketball Association each season that Raveling was at Iowa’s helm.
Fast forward through the rest of the Davis years, the Steve Alford era, and the Lickliter days. This is the situation that McCaffery came into when he accepted his current job.
Like Raveling, Lickliter coached at Iowa for three years. During those three seasons, Iowa never qualified for the NCAA tournament. The most wins the Hawkeyes got was 15 and were never ranked in any polls. The only way an Iowa player got to an NBA game was as a spectator who bought a ticket.
Saying that Davis had more to work with when he came to Iowa City is an understatement. Davis took over a team that was a perennial tournament squad. Comparatively, McCaffery came into a situation that was in shambles.
The Hawkeyes have averaged 73.2 points per game under McCaffery so far. In Davis’ first six seasons at Iowa, the Hawkeyes averaged 83.7 points per game. On the defensive end, Davis’ first six teams gave up an average of 76.87 points per game, while McCaffery’s have allowed 67.55. It has to be mentioned that 16 years passed between Davis’ sixth season at Iowa and McCaffery’s first, and during that time the game changed to less of a high-scoring affair than in Davis’ early days. For the eras that each coach competed in, these are very comparable statistics as the average margin of victory is nearly identical.
Davis coached the Hawkeyes for 13 seasons, and if you project a continuation of the upward trajectory over that same time frame for McCaffery, he will approach and could surpass what Davis accomplished.
The Hawkeyes went from 11 wins in McCaffery’s first season to 18 wins in his second campaign to 25 wins in his third season. Since then, McCaffery has put together a 20-win and two consecutive 22-win seasons. Averaging those gives us an average of 20, which we’ll treat as a bottom of the range for a projection of a hypothetical seven future seasons.
Seven more 20-win seasons would put McCaffery at 258 wins at Iowa after 13 seasons, just 11 victories short of Davis’ all-time leading 269 victories for the Hawkeyes. As previously stated, our data sample is treating 20 wins per season as a bottom of the range, however. If McCaffery’s teams can get to 22 wins in six of those seven seasons, McCaffery will surpass Davis in wins.
If you take out the first three seasons that it took McCaffery to bring the Hawkeyes back from the dead, McCaffery’s winning percentage at Iowa is .640, a tad better than Davis’ over his first six seasons.
In the past three seasons, McCaffery’s teams have won two NCAA tournament games. Projecting that rate over seven more seasons would give McCaffery seven tournament wins, just one short of Davis’ eight. Again, if McCaffery’s teams were to manage just two more tourney victories over that seven-year time frame, McCaffery would have the most tournament wins in Iowa history after 13 seasons.
There are no guarantees, and it’s possible that these projections might not pan out. The fact that McCaffery has a path to becoming Iowa’s winningest coach ever after his first six seasons is significant, however, in and of itself.