Iowa basketball: Fran McCaffery’s body of work speaks for itself
By Andrew Wade
McCaffery’s regular season success is right behind Tom Davis’
By no means has Fran McCaffery reached Tom Davis-level yet, but he’s certainly making a better case to be included in that conversation from a wins and losses perspective.
Fran has been head coach of the Iowa basketball team for 8.5 seasons after taking over for the disastrous three-year tenure of Todd Lickliter, who effectively left the program in shambles.
In this time, he has accrued 167 wins to 125 losses, good for a 57% winning percentage while posting a 71-81 record in Big Ten play. While those numbers may not seem great, let’s remove the first two seasons where Fran was attempting to rebuild a broken Iowa basketball program.
In 6.5 seasons, Fran totaled 138 wins and 88 losses (61% winning percentage) while improving his Big Ten conference record significantly winning 61 of those contests and losing 57 (52% winning percentage).
We don’t really need to compare this to Lickliter, who was terrible, but this is better than Steve Alford who had a 59% winning percentage in eight seasons (152 – 106) and a 48% winning percentage in the conference (61 – 67).
Tom Davis does reign supreme though with 264 wins to just 131 losses (67% winning percentage) and a 114 to 98 conference win/loss record (54%) in 13 seasons at the helm.
When you look closer at the numbers, however, Fran is actually averaging more wins per season (21) then Tom Davis did in his 13-year career with Iowa (20). Now, for context, I cut out Fran’s first two seasons as those were an anomaly and college basketball teams play more games now then they did in the late 80’s/early 90’s. The average losses between the two coaches (Fran averages 13.5 whereas Tom averaged 10) shows that discrepancy in total games a little better.
So Fran is averaging a 21 – 13/14 season while Tom averaged 20-10. Breaking out the numbers like that doesn’t look all that bad for good ole Fran.