As Payton Sandfort’s Iowa career nears end, he has reason to be ‘pretty ecstatic’

IOWA CITY — Payton Sandfort has experienced “a lot of really tough nights” as a leader on the 2024-25 Iowa men’s basketball team.

“It sucks,” Sandfort said candidly. “This season — it hasn’t been what I dreamed of when I made the decision in May to come back to school. You have all these goals and these dreams, and you picture what it’s going to look like. And things have gotten in the way of that.”

Iowa is 15-14 overall and 6-12 in Big Ten play. Neither a winning record nor a Big Ten tournament berth are guarantees with only two regular season games remaining. (If the conference tournament began this Wednesday, the Hawkeyes would be watching from home.)

Iowa will have somewhat of an oasis from a season full of “bumps and bruises” and other tribulations on Thursday, however, as the Hawkeyes celebrate their five-player senior class ahead of their home finale against No. 8 Michigan State.

The five seniors most notably include Sandfort — an under-recruited player from Waukee who has contributed to the Hawkeyes’ success in all four years on campus and currently ranks 14th in program history in scoring — along with Even Brauns, Luc Laketa, Riley Mulvey and Morehead State transfer Drew Thelwell.

“If I look back on my career and if I would have told my 18-year-old self this is what it was going to be like, I think he’d be pretty ecstatic,” Sandfort said.

Sandfort is second on the team this season with 16.1 points per game, barely trailing injury-sidelined Owen Freeman’s 16.7 points per game. He has been one of the best free-throw shooters in the Big Ten as well, shooting 90.3 percent from the line in conference play.

He was a third-team all-Big Ten honoree in 2023-24 and passed on NBA opportunities to stay at Iowa for his final season of eligibility. Before that, he was the Big Ten Sixth Man of the Year in 2022-23.

Even as far back as his freshman year, Sandfort appeared in all but two games and averaged five points in 10.5 minutes per game. That was on the team that claimed the program’s third Big Ten tournament title (and first title since 2006).

“He’s a guy that was able to contribute immediately, which is very difficult to do at this level,” Iowa Coach Fran McCaffery said. “We had some good players and a good team when he got here, but he was very, very instrumental in that championship team.”

McCaffery has the “utmost respect for everything that he goes through,” and the respect is mutual.

“At first you see him on TV when I’m growing up, and I was a little intimidated by him when he started recruiting me,” Sandfort said. “But now, he’s a really good dude. He gets kind of a bad rap because of his antics on TV, but all that is just caring for us and wanting the best for his players.”

The Sandfort-led senior class is in somewhat of an unusual position with this year’s lackluster results. McCaffery’s teams have earned March Madness bids in four of the last five seasons and have not finished below 60th in analytics website KenPom’s rankings since 2017-18.

Now, the Hawkeyes — ranked 73rd by KenPom, as of Wednesday afternoon — are fighting simply for one of the 15 spots in the Big Ten tournament.

“This isn’t really the season that I’ve really wanted to be defined by,” Sandfort said. “But in a way, this is kind of like the person that I am. … When times were the toughest and when things weren’t going well, I stayed true to my character. I kept fighting.”

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