McCaffrey’s Eleven: How Iowa Heisted a Victory from Michigan State
A minute 1:29 separates Iowa from their 3rd straight loss in Big Ten play. Head Coach Fran McCaffrey — less than a week removed from his ejection in Iowa’s loss to Northwestern — barely avoids another technical foul after staring down the referee. Iowa is down 91-81 to Michigan State. However, for disgruntled Hawkeyes fans who turned the TV off at this point, they missed out on the single greatest heist of the 22-23 season. For, 25 minutes later, the Hawkeyes were celebrating a 112-106 victory against the Spartans.
The Hawkeyes have emerged as the Big Ten’s villain in recent seasons. Top 5 NBA draft pick Keegan Murray paired alongside longtime Hawkeye Jordan Bohannon to make last year’s 5 seed team the Big Ten tournament champions! However, both have since departed from the team. Iowa adopted a “next man up” policy, as nearly all of their players are at least a sophomore. Among them, the starting lineup is commanded by Murray’s brother, Kris Murray. Him and Filip Rebraca create a dominant, albeit small, backcourt that confounds teams. Alongside two of McCaffrey children in Connor and Patrick McCaffrey, this Iowa team was playing on a tournament-team level.
However, it felt like Iowa was squandering their opportunity to make a 3rd straight NCAA tournament. The Hawkeyes lost an away game to Northwestern by 20. Sure, losing to the Wildcats is reasonable, but the margin and McCaffrey’s ejection were concerning to a fanbase that was on the bubble. To make matters worse, Iowa had the opportunity to play spoiler in a must-win game for Wisconsin, but squandered this opportunity as well. Their 12 point loss to the Badgers kept Wisconsin’s hopes alive while simultaneously jeopardizing the Hawkeyes, who dropped to a 9 seed in the tournament. A 3rd loss against Michigan State — especially considering after MSU, the group would have to take on Indiana at Assembly Hall — could prove to be a drastic setback. For awhile, it looked like it would be.
However, after a foul call that infuriated McCaffrey, he took matters into his own hands. Despite being down by 11 with less than a minute left, the Hawkeyes scored on every possession to come back from the deficit even against good MSU free throw shooting. The odds of this happening were 200-1 according to ESPN analytics, who gave Michigan State a 99.5% chance to win the game. To Hawkeyes fans, this invigorated the fanbase. McCaffrey backed up his fiery, passionate coaching that got him into trouble with the officials by scoring 20 points in 90 seconds. In D1 Men’s Basketball, SportsRec notes that the average men’s basketball team scores 67.875 points in a 40 minute game. A quick calculation shows how the the Hawkeyes — college basketball’s very own Ocean’s 11 — was over 7 times as efficient as the average D1 team in the last 90 seconds of the game. It is only as far back as 2016, when Texas A&M stormed back from a similar deficit against Northern Iowa in the 2nd round of the tournament, that we can find numbers similar to Iowa’s performance. As proven by their fiery actions both on and off the court, Iowa is a team to be feared at the big dance no matter if you’re an opposing team’s fan, spectator, or even an on-court referee!
