Fran McCaffery has ‘no intention of moving on’ from Iowa men’s basketball after 2024-25

IOWA CITY — Fran McCaffery removed any ambiguity about his desire to continue coaching at Iowa beyond the 2024-25 season.

McCaffery has “no intention of moving on” from Hawkeye men’s basketball, the 15th-year head coach told reporters on Tuesday.

“I'm fully committed to the program, to the players,” McCaffery said.

McCaffery’s comments came ahead of Iowa’s final home game against No. 8 Michigan State later this week and then the regular season finale at Nebraska on Sunday.

“I just came to work today, tried to figure out how we can beat Michigan State,” McCaffery said. “Did some other conversation — professional conversation, of course — on a number of different topics and get ready for practice today.”

Hours earlier, Michigan State’s Tom Izzo said McCaffery is not “going out with a season that isn’t superb, in my humble opinion. Nor do I think he should.”

“I would be sad if he decided enough is enough like a lot of coaches are doing, because he's one of the good guys,” Izzo said, per Chris Solari of the Detroit Free Press.

Iowa — 15-14 overall and 6-12 in Big Ten play — is in danger of being one of the three teams to not earn a spot in this year’s Big Ten tournament and could potentially finish with a losing record for only the third time in his Iowa tenure.

McCaffery became the program’s all-time wins leader last season and has led the Hawkeyes to March Madness bids in four of the last five years with tournaments. (Iowa appeared to be an obvious March Madness team in 2020, too, before the COVID-19 pandemic prompted the tournament’s cancellation.)

At the same time, he is at the helm of a program that has struggled to generate fan enthusiasm and has not advanced past the first weekend of the NCAA tournament since 1999. Those factors have prompted many rumors among fans about his future.

“I don’t really pay any attention to it, so I don’t address it,” McCaffery said. “We’re just business as usual.”

McCaffery is under contract through 2027-28. His most recent extension, signed by then-Iowa athletics director Gary Barta, was announced ahead of the 2020-21 NCAA tournament. The Hawkeyes were coming off a third-place Big Ten finish and had a No. 2 seed in that year’s tournament.

Any contract buyout would be an added cost at a time when Iowa — and the rest of the country — braces for a new financial reality amid direct revenue-sharing with athletes.

Comments: john.steppe@thegazette.com

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