Help Wanted:

The current state of Iowa basketball leaves many Hawkeye fans longing for the Lute Olson or Tom Davis eras. The program has been on a down word spiral since a 1st round NCAA tournament loss to Northwestern State in 2006. The Hawks haven’t made a sweet sixteen appearance since 1999 where they lost to the eventual national champion UCON Huskies. Tom Davis was told to hit the road after that season. This basically implied that sweet 16 appearances weren’t good enough. Not good enough to make up for the loss of instate talent like Kirk Heinrich, Nick Collison, and Raef Lafrentz.


2000 ushered in the Steve Alford era, or as many of us remember it the Al-fraud era. This excessive hair gel wearing, ex Indiana legend brought with him the promise of great Indiana recruiting, and a sweet 16 appearance in his prior season. I will have to admit I fell for it. I watched him speak at a basketball camp in Iowa City in 2001. He told a group of High School kids, “You should never miss a jump shot left or right only long or short.” He then proceeded to make 10 straight 3 pointers. That was the most impressive thing Alford did at Iowa, aside from a few Big Ten tournament runs. He had the talent ; Reggie Evans, Luke Recker , Jeff Horner, Greg Brunner , Tyler Smith and Pierre Pierce. A lot of his good recruiting classes never paid dividends, or parking meters in the case of Sean Sonderliter. We don’t need to even talk about, let’s just say “P Squared”, also known as the man who had the entire Illini student section chanting, no means no. With that Alford was gone, just another guy from Indiana who thinks he should get free cars for a being a basketball coach.



We decided to get practical. We needed to get back to blue collar Iowa basketball. This involves developing players. So we found a man from the cradle of hoops. Todd Lickliter was coming off a sweet 16 run with a great Butler team. He coached in legendary Hinkle Field House. I mean Hoosiers was filmed in that building. If a man who has coached in that building can’t develop talent then who can?


The Lickliter era just finished season two and it’s not looking good. Attendance is down at Carver Hawkeye and the departure of Jake Kelley, and Jeff Petersen will leave us scrambling to find guards for Lickliter’s guard oriented offense. His overall record is 28-36 and 11-27 in Big Ten play. These aren’t pretty numbers, and next season doesn’t look bright. He doesn’t have the talent to get it done next year. We are in serious need of a Junior College transfer at point guard and a post presence. I think that Gatens, Fuller and Tucker could all develop into quality Big Ten players. Bawinkle will no longer be a role player but will most likely be forced into the starting lineup. Jarryd Cole will be our only post player with any experience. The University needs to put more money into recruiting. We can’t win without talent and depth. We currently have neither. Lickliter is a better coach than Alford, but we haven’t seen better results. Alford took over a team coming off of a sweet 16 season. Lickliter took over a program in shambles. The recruiting efforts must improve, but we need to give Lickliter at least three more years to try and establish some recruiting relationships. The program has a long way to go. We just extended a scholarship offer to Marcus Jordan. This could be the catalyst we need to get positive attention back in Carver. I mean come on, who wouldn’t want to be in line for a giant pretzel at Carver and run into Michael Jordan?