I don't know if I would bet on it happening, but I can at least see a path for 20 regular season wins for Iowa. Their non-conference schedule is forgiving - at Virginia, at Iowa St., and a game against Utah St. in Sioux Falls are the only games against decent competition, and Iowa State is essentially the Big 12 equivalent of Minnesota this year with their complete restart. They will be 15+ point favorites in the other eight games. 9 wins should be the minimum there, and realistically should get 10. Add in 7 games against what should be the bottom four in the league (Penn State, Northwestern, Nebraska, Minnesota). Go 6-1 in those, and Iowa would just need to go 4-9 in the remainder of their Big Ten games to get to 20. That seems plausible to me. I think they'll end up in the 8-10 range at the end of the season with teams like Wisconsin and Rutgers. Don't get them being a top 25 Kenpom team to start the year. That said, with their non-conference schedule, I'm not convinced 20 wins would be enough to get them into the field.
All but 2 players transferred out. One of those (Eric Curry) retired and then unretired because the other and the transfer at PF both tore their ACL in the summer. You kind of have to take that many transfers if you want to field a roster. At least the incoming recruiting is going well.
Beard got it to work with Mac McClung, who may have had an even worse reputation defensively than Carr does.
#Ohio State Buckeyes At what point does Holtmann's seat start to get warm? It's year five and his best finish in conference was 2nd in his first year. Since then he's never finished better than 5th. And he's never gotten out of the first weekend. I'd think that's not good enough for you guys.
go ahead and just paste the football power rankings over in this thread too because IU will be near the bottom throughout the season
2-0. The team looks better than I thought they would. We’re terribly undersized but we actually have shooters. Maybe we can avoid being a terrible SOS opponent for B1G tourney contenders.
So was Eric Curry. He was the 6th man on a NCAA tournament team as a freshman. He tore his ACL in September of his sophomore year (17-18) and then another knee injury that caused him to miss 2019-20. He retired and agreed to be a GA this off-season and then came back when both PFs on the roster tore their ACLs.
I forgot, we’ve got another 6th year that played AAU with Curry. He is back at Minnesota for the 2nd time as part of his 3rd transfer and second grad transfer.
We're built like a good mid-major team. Made up primarily of older, experienced players that is led by perimeter players, and I've been encouraged from what I've seen from the coaching staff from an in-game perspective. Shooting has been emphasized with the team over athleticism for the most part. But we will be very undersized against Big Ten competition, it's below average athletically from a Big Ten standard, and there is very little depth (generally going with a 7 man rotation), so injuries or early foul trouble will be essential to avoid. I'd still be surprised if we didn't end up in the bottom four of the league, but we were being treated as a tier below the Northwestern/Penn St./Nebraska's of the world, and I don't think the Gophers are that different than those clubs. But going against the Cockburn/Dickinson/Edey type of players will not end well. I feel better about our future after seeing the team being reasonably well coached through four games, as that was my biggest question about the Ben Johnson hire. But that is more for future seasons, this season will still likely have more downs than ups once we get to conference play.
The last paragraph is a good summary of my feelings. We look surprisingly well coached (good ball movement, unselfish, good defensive rotations for this point in the season) considering it’s an entirely new team. But we are woefully undersized, lack depth and don’t have any all B1G type player which is a bad recipe in the B1G. We will probably be pesky and have a few players that look like they could get hot on any given night but we aren’t a tournament contender. I thought we could easily be a 150-200 type team and look more like ~100 and entertaining so I’m having fun with it.