Iowa’s McCaffery talks season, tenure and assistants

Like nearly every basketball coach in America, Iowa's Fran McCaffery was at the Final Four. He was busy at events, and although he was a tad under the weather, I caught up with him and discussed plenty of basketball matters.

I asked McCaffery about this year's squad, which seemed to move forward every time it faced a crossroads moment. McCaffery, like many coaches, preferred to look at the games individually rather than collectively.

'For some reason everybody wants to put everything into a category,' he said. 'Everybody gets too excited and they get too panicked. We lost to Northwestern on the road, a very good team, and it was like, 'What's the matter?' We lost to a Big Ten team on the road. They played a little better than we did today. It's not that big of a deal. Sure we wanted to win. I didn't think we'd beat Nebraska by 30. They had a bad day. They weren't that bad. A pretty good team. Preseason ranked and it didn't end the way they wanted it to, but I didn't expect to go there and win by 30.

'It's a long journey, and we had four losses in the nonconference to really good teams. Everybody says, 'Wow, Syracuse wasn't what they were.' They've got two pros and one of the best shooters in the country. They still won 20 games in the ACC. Pretty good team. Texas has as much talent as anybody, they're a tournament team. Could we have played better in those four games? Absolutely. But we lost to good teams that played better than we did that day. It's nothing more than that.

'I don't look at it at the point where we had to have some type of meeting where we had to go one way or the other. No, we play the next game and try to play better. I think it's much simpler than everybody tries to make it out to be.

'Now, that said, what if you lose the next game? Which is what your point is. It's just like last year when everybody's like what happened? You and I have talked about it, we lost to Michigan State on the road, we lost to Indiana on the road, we lost to Minnesota on the road. We were in every game, we could have won every one of them. Tough losses, but you lose on the road to a team that won the NIT (Minnesota), a team that went to the Elite Eight (Michigan State) and against a team that had a couple pros on it (Indiana) in a tough place to play. We lose in overtime (Tennessee) and then we lose at the buzzer (Illinois). Everybody's like, 'What's the matter?' You don't want to lose five or six

? I always tend to give my opponent a little more credit than other people want to give them. They only look at it from one perspective.'

STORY ABOUT THE FUTURE

McCaffery now has coached at Iowa for five seasons, the same length of time he led Siena before coming to Iowa City in 2010. Iowa's program was in shambles when he arrived. The Hawkeyes had a school-record 22 losses, the lowest attendance in program history and no separate practice facility. After a five-year postseason absence (including his first season), McCaffery has directed Iowa to four straight postseason tournaments and two consecutive NCAA tournaments.

'I have so much respect for the league and how hard it is, and that's why I appreciate what our players did,' he said. 'They came with confidence. 'Maybe it's not what it was today, but it will be better because we're here

.' They had confidence in themselves, they believed in me and my staff. Our fan base was really phenomenal. They jumped right in. We talk about style of play and it was really important in this case because of the history. The fan base at Iowa is very aware of history. Who came before, coaches and players. You can have your favorite era, your favorite players, your favorite coaches, but they all played fast. It's kind of what they expect to see. It's kind of what they want to see. That's how you play.

'We know that to be successful, that's how you play. That's what we've seen. Now we're able to do the same thing. There was a time where we had to ratchet up the defense a little bit. We were scoring the ball big time in year two, year three, but our defense was not as consistent as it needed to be to get back to this tournament. So you learn and you draw from that. Sometimes as players, you've got to figure it out, too. Coaches are harping on defense: 'If we score 89, we'll be OK.' I remember when we were on the road in year two at Indiana, we scored 89, shot 80 percent on the road in the second half and lost by 14. We gave up 103. Sometimes you've got to go through that. We were on the road. 'We were cooking.'

'Yeah, so were they.' They sort of figured it out, how to compete, how to prepare and how to prepare on a year-round basis. It's not just Oct. 15. It never ends.

'I think the practice facility in these five years have been really a major factor in their ability to do that. Not only the practice facility, but the weight room. It's all right there and the convenience of it, those guys took advantage of it and that was part of the plan. When I came, I said 'Hey look what we've got going on, it's pretty exciting.' It was. The first year we were kind of jumping around. 'Hey look, it's coming.' That was big.' 

McCaffery isn't a fan of recruiting stars. Among incoming Big Ten players in the 2011-12 class, only Indiana's Cody Zeller and Michigan State's Branden Dawson were rated as a five-stars by Rivals. The four-star players included Ohio State's Sam Thompson, Amir Williams, LaQuinton Ross and Shannon Scott and Illinois' Nnanna Egwu. Michigan guard Trey Burke and Wisconsin center Frank Kaminsky — both of whom earned national player of the year honors — were three-star recruits. Other three-star recruits were Iowa's Aaron White and Jarrod Uthoff (originally a Wisconsin signee), Minnesota's Andre Hollins and Michigan State's Travis Trice.

'To me you go, you evaluate, obviously you've already evaluated, what are our needs?' McCaffery said. 'Positionally, do we need to be quicker, do we need to be bigger, do I need a point, do I need a post ...? You go watch and you say, 'This guy can play, he can play in my system, he's good. I can beat that team if I have this guy.' That's how I looked at it. I never says, 'Oh, Rivals says ...' I don't care what Rivals says. I do not care. Frank Kaminsky was the backup center on his AAU team behind Nnanna Egwu, who's very good. Nnanna Egwu is very good, but he's not Frank. So you can go to every team in every conference and have the same conversation with the guy. Now, it would be nice to be John (Calipari of Kentucky) and get all fives. But even Tyler Ulis, he wasn't a five when we started recruiting him. 'He's too little, he can't play in the BCS.'

Yes he can. But that's why recruiting will never be an exact science.'

McCaffery's staff of Kirk Speraw, Andrew Francis and Sherman Dillard all have stayed with him so far in his tenure. Keeping the staff together has benefitted McCaffery and Iowa.

'It is rare,' McCaffery said. 'It's exciting for me because it speaks to the fact that they enjoy working at the University of Iowa. They love our players, they really enjoy and are invested in the community. They enjoy living there. Because people leave jobs for a lot of reasons, it's not always, 'I have a better opportunity.' (Sometimes it's), 'Well I'd rather live there, I'd rather coach for that head coach.'

'I think they have been underappreciated in terms of being recognized as candidates for head coaching positions. But I also think that it's testament to their diligence that they're not out networking, that they're doing the job that they have. As a head coach or a fan, you certainly would appreciate that. If they're on the phone all day trying to get another job, then we're not getting the recruits that we need and our players aren't getting developed. So I like the fact that they want to be here and they want to stay. It looks like we'll be together again.'