By Blake Dowson
It’s disappointing that the Iowa men’s basketball team was bounced from the second round of the NIT on its home court on Sunday.
Taking a step back, it was disappointing the team didn’t beat Indiana during the Big Ten Tournament when doing so quite possibly would have gotten it into the NCAA Tournament.
But at the beginning of the season, when Iowa was losing every game away from home and even one inside Carver-Hawkeye to — gulp — Nebraska-Omaha, would it really have seemed like that big of a disappointment if someone told you the Hawkeyes were going to end up one, maybe two, games away from making the NCAA Tournament?
The expectations were curbed this year. That’s natural when you have a team that starts four freshmen and a senior a year after starting four seniors and a junior.
So beating Iowa State and Purdue at home, along with Maryland and Wisconsin on the road, really exceeded the expectations that were tagged onto the young squad this year. Jordan Bohannon, Tyler Cook, Cordell Pemsl, and Isaiah Moss outperformed what was expected from them.
That comes at a price, though.
Those four freshmen have proved to the entire conference they belong, and that they can already play at a very high level. There can be no more talk about a “young team” because Bohannon, Cook, Pemsl, and Moss proved at the end of this season that it is unfair to label them as “young,” which has a negative connotation much of the time, when in all reality they were playing like veterans. They earned the right to be considered veterans, and they now have to be treated as such.
Next season (which starts right now for the team, as made apparent by Cook hitting the practice gym only hours after the TCU loss) cannot be accompanied by people curbing expectations because there are a bunch of sophomores out there on the court.
Bohannon, Cook, Pemsl, Moss, Nicholas Baer, and Ahmad Wagner may still be young in terms of eligibility, but not in terms of playing time. Each one of those guys logged at least 580 minutes this season.
In a game where underclassmen have quite a learning curve, each of those players should be over that hump at this point.
Whereas the end of this regular season was a pleasant surprise to everyone involved in the Iowa program, there needs to be even more accountability placed on the players next season.
This is a program that let Peter Jok leave before he could win a Big Ten Tournament game. That needs to change next season before Dom Uhl has to say the same when he runs out of eligibility.
It’s also a program that hasn’t been to the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament since the last season of the Dr. Tom Davis era in 1999.
Fran McCaffery has had teams in the past that were talented enough to get to the Sweet 16. His teams had been ranked in each of the past three seasons at one point, and in two of those seasons were ranked in the top 10.
The team he’ll put on the floor next season is as talented as any of them, and the expectations should be as such.
Grumblings would be warranted if Iowa yet again loses in the first round of the Big Ten Tournament and exits early from whichever other postseason tournament it earns a bid.
Big Ten all-freshman nominations for Bohannon and Cook and a Big Ten Sixth Man of the Year honor for Baer set the stage for success at Iowa. But it can’t be future success.
It needs to happen right now.