Fran McCaffery Will Be Introduced As Iowa’s New Head Coach On Monday

It is a rumored report no more: Fran McCaffery will become the new head basketball coach at Iowa and will be formally introduced by the school Monday morning.

McCaffery spent the last five seasons as the head coach at Siena, where he amassed an 112-51 record with the Saints, and won the past three Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference championships. In the NCCA tournament, they won their first round game in both 2008 and 2009; this season, they fell to Purdue in the first round.

For all things Iowa, visit our Hawkeyes blog, Black Heart Gold Pants, where they have all the information on McCaffery that you could possibly hope for, plus some initial reaction, in which they remind that “for a program at rock bottom,” McCaffery is a good hire.

There will certainly be criticism. There will be those who criticize his lack of Iowa connections, as if that mattered with Tom Davis and George Raveling. There will be those who criticize his mid-major pedigree, as if that mattered with Lute Olson. There will be those who criticize simply because he’s named Fran, or because he’s from Pennsylvania, or because he looks like an English Lit professor. But for a program at rock bottom, losing 20 games, playing in an empty arena, still without practice space, Fran McCaffery is a good hire on paper. This is not Kansas, or Texas, or even Iowa circa 1999, or 1986, or 1983. This is a trainwreck to which the coaching names floated by the delusional would not dream of coming, and a trainwreck short of the cash needed to change their minds. Fran McCaffery has resurrected programs in this situation before. On day one, let’s just hope he can do it again.