Who is Billy Taylor, the Iowa Hawkeyes’ acting head men’s basketball coach Sunday?

Billy Taylor is Iowa’s acting head men’s basketball coach Sunday because he had been in charge of scouting for that day’s game against Minnesota in Iowa City.

When Iowa Coach Fran McCaffery (out for Sunday’s game because he has entered health and safety protocols after testing positive for COVID-19 Friday) got a two-game suspension in 2019 because of a tirade against a game official, the acting head coaches were assistants Kirk Speraw and Andrew Francis. That’s because they had already been assigned scouting duties for those games.

Taylor was hired by McCaffery from Division II Belmont Abbey in 2019 when Francis left to take a similar position at California. Taylor had already worked as Iowa’s director of basketball operations from 2014-2016, but had worked with McCaffery long before that.

Taylor played at Notre Dame when McCaffery was an assistant coach there, then was on John MacLeod’s Notre Dame staff with McCaffery in the 1998-99 season, and was an assistant for McCaffery at UNC Greensboro from 1999-2002.

He then was Lehigh’s head coach for five seasons and Ball State’s for six. His second Lehigh team won 20 games and reached the NCAA tournament. He was the Patriot League’s Coach of the Year twice.

Taylor was fired after his 15-15 final season at Ball State and came to work at Iowa before becoming Belmont Abbey’s coach from 2016-19. His final team there went 23-8.

Taylor’s career record as a head coach is 214-210. His record against Big Ten teams is 0-8, but he was at Lehigh and Ball State, and all of those games were on the road.