Locked On Hawkeyes - Daily Podcast On Iowa Hawkeyes Football & Basketball - Iowa Hawkeyes' first road win: A turning point for the season?

Starting point is 00:00:00 down to starters. Iowa gets its first road win of the season as they go into New Jersey and get the win against Rutgers and an emotional frame of capri. What's up with that? We break it down today. Locked on Hawkeyes. You are locked on Hawkeyes, your daily podcast on the Iowa Hawkeyes. Part of the Locked On Podcast Network, your team every day. Welcome in, I'm Trent Condon and this is the Locked On Hawkeyes podcast. Thanks for being with us and making Locked On Hawkeyes your first listen every day. We're available wherever you find podcasts. You can also watch us on YouTube. Make sure you hit that subscribe button while you're there. If you're listening on the audio side, hey, we're looking for some new reviews out there. Hit that up

Starting point is 00:00:50 on the Apple side of things. Really do appreciate it and helps us get in front of more Hawkeye fans. Today's episode of Lockdown Hawkeyes is brought to you by FanDuel. Right now, new FanDuel customers can get $150 in bonus bets if you win your first $5 bet. Visit Fandual.com for more. Well, we are into it. And how about that one? Iowa gets the win against Rutgers, their first road victory of the year. And it wasn't just that Iowa had been losing games on the road. I mean, that's a characteristic that a lot of teams

Starting point is 00:01:21 certainly go through throughout the course of the season. It's hard to get wins on the road. It's a difficult thing and if it was easy, well we wouldn't be talking about it but here we are watching this Iowa team come out there and respond trailing ten two and and we got a lot to get into. We're gonna talk a little bit the women back on the hardwood tonight against Rutgers themselves though this one a Carver Hawkeye Arena gonna talk about that a little NFL draft combine to get into as well.

Starting point is 00:01:47 And of course, we're going to talk about what we saw after the game and frame a Caffrey and just the emotions and some questions that are there. But in the here and now, let's kick things off just talking about this game and talking about what we saw out of this group. Because I think it bears a conversation. This was a gritty win. This was a gritty win.

Starting point is 00:02:05 This was a gutty win. This was something frankly, I didn't know if it was left in this squad to do what they did against Rutgers. Now Rutgers has two incredibly talented players. Harper, Bailey, those two guys are absolute studs. They're gonna be both lottery picks, maybe even both top five picks.

Starting point is 00:02:24 I saw a mock draft yesterday that had them going two and three in the upcoming NBA draft and you saw the talent of both of those guys, but he also saw the negativity that goes along with it. And the Somerville is a nice big body. He's also a freshman. Remember his dad, Marcellus Somerville led Bradley to the sweet 16 after starting his career at Iowa, redshirted his first year and then under shady circumstances left the program tampering from Jim Less in that Bradley program. What could have been? He helped lead Bradley to a Sweet 16 if he was on those Iowa teams? We could be having a whole lot of different conversation, but that's, that's maybe an

Starting point is 00:03:00 off season topic that we can talk to. Let's get back to the game. And right away, so as I'm sure many of you might have been doing, got home from work, had already shoveled in the morning, had to get back out it again. Well, a lot of people here and I went, of course, across the Midwest. Free people live outside the snow area. Congratulations to you.

Starting point is 00:03:18 So I wanted to get a little more shoveling done, though. So listen to, until the first the first TV type out the under 16 on the radio and listening to, um, Dolph was gone as he continues to recuperate after the, uh, uh, leg surgery, I believe it was that he had. So it was Brooks along with Bobby Hanson and it was very uncharacteristic Iowa. And I went back and watched it then after the game and just seeing them turnover the basketball like that. So they're playing without Drew Thelwell. You're already down on Freeman. Now you're down Drew Thelwell. I've maintained Drew Thelwell throughout the course of the season has been my favorite Hawkeye to watch throughout the course of this year, not just because of the high level of play that he

Starting point is 00:04:02 has, but also the tenacity the ability to get up and defend the other the intangible things that he does really like fell well you're playing without him and They turn it over four times in the first five minutes or so of the game It's just so uncharacteristic of a frame of cat free team and and right away the thought for me went to this team's cooked It's over his team is not going to respond again. You look back at what they've done on the road. Blown out by Ohio State. Blown out by UCLA. Blown out against USC. Blown out by Wisconsin. That has been the slate. The one high water mark was when they were getting blown out against Michigan, came

Starting point is 00:04:42 roaring back and had a chance to win that one. Remember that was also back in the beginning of December, which feels like a lifetime ago. So that's where we are. And down 10-2, they didn't quit. This game was a lot of Josh Dicks. It was a lot of patency effort. It was an absolute team effort. And you're going to need that when you're down like they are. Down two starters. Dembele maybe had the game of his career. He was outstanding and not just the nine points that he had the up and under move that got him the first buck of the game late in the game getting the jump ball getting the time out to go along with it getting Iowa that extra possession were Rutgers if they would have got the ball there down to we could be having a completely different conversation. But he played good defense. He was engaged. I thought Dembele was certainly one of the bright marks if this would. Say to Traore, still need to give him the minutes. This is a guy that we need to find out exactly what he's going to be

Starting point is 00:05:36 going forward. He is an important piece to this Iowa basketball team. But with Traore, now you see a guy, the athleticism, he was rebounding his ass off. Love to see that out of him because he needs to do that. We're not talking about an incredibly skilled offensive player. There's athleticism. There's a guy I think that can develop into at least a decent three-point shooter. He's not there yet. But with the, I guess the play-doh that he has, right, you're trying to mold it together, you see that this is a guy that there is upside. Keep giving him those minutes as he played 25 last night. Dixon Sanford as Iowa goes, as these two go, that's how Iowa goes. And when they go off and combine for 46 points, you're going to be in good shape. You need this Josh Dix every

Starting point is 00:06:16 time. And certainly now down Freeman, he just has to be aggressive because we've seen it too many times in the course of his career. Things are going well, starts to retreat, isn't aggressive. When he's going well and he's aggressive, he's as skilled of an offensive guy as you're going to find. The mid-range game is elite. He's a good three-point shooter on top of it and he was outstanding again last night. And mention again, we're stacking up some quality price Sanford games now going back the last two games prices played back to back really good games and then we didn't shoot it well from the outside got to the rim a couple of different times like to see that as well from Peyton Sanford a couple of different times beautiful beautiful

Starting point is 00:06:58 play late in that game as they curled them around and got him an easy bucket in both those guys not just being reliant only on being three-point shooters, but having the versatility of an offensive game. And on the defensive end, what they did to this group and made it difficult on them to get going. And he threw this all together. And Iowa comes back and gets this victory, heads up plays,

Starting point is 00:07:21 good defensive stops. I thought they bothered both Bailey and Harper at different times in this game. But they did in a game where they shoot seven to 25 from three, including one stretch, where they missed 14 straight three-pointers. If you would have said coming into this game that I was going to go seven to 25 from three,

Starting point is 00:07:40 they're going to miss 14 straight at one stretch, I said, how much do they lose by? Was it 15? Was it 20? was it 30? No They won tip of the ball cap to the squad the perseverance to stick with it I Didn't know if it was in him. It was credit to these guys

Starting point is 00:07:59 Carter Kingsbury came in he gave them a good four minutes of action Evan bronze I'll beat in Somerville down the floor for a dunk. That was great to see he went in there. He gave them a good four minutes of action. Evan Bronze beat Summerville down the floor for a dunk. That was great to see. He went in there. He was active. Mulvey came in and did his Mulvey things as an extra big out there. Like when you're bench after Price-Sanford, your seven through nine guys comprised of Evan Bronze, Riley Mulvey, and Carter Kingsbury. It's not a group you think are going to go out there and win a road game. It wasn't obviously them alone, but they were able to get it done.

Starting point is 00:08:30 Big win for this Iowa team and really puts them now in perspective where they are at minimum a realistic chance now to make the big 10 tournament a better chance than not of making the big 10 tournament. As we've talked about, the bottom three teams in the Big Ten will not make the Big Ten tournament. Teams 16, 17, and 18, you're out. With this win, I was in good shape. Need at least one more. Washington likely amongst them.

Starting point is 00:08:56 But do you want to start to get a little silly? We've done crazier things here. Let's do that as we continue. Fram McCaffrey after the game. We saw a side of Fran McCaffrey we very rarely see. Emotional Fran. What do we read into that? Speculation time. The future of Iowa basketball and what the rest of the season could unfold. We'll do that as we continue on the Locked On Hawkeyes Podcast.

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Starting point is 00:10:45 Five stars is what we're looking for. If you can really do appreciate that. After the game goes final, here comes the Indycats and I anticipated we're going to get a typical Fran McCaffrey post game. He'll talk about the guys. He'll talk about the standard things that we get. A lot of times in an interview like that, Fran does give thoughtful answers. But to see emotion from Fram McAfee like that, to see tears, and not just

Starting point is 00:11:16 eyes welling up, actual tears running down his face. It's been a trying year for Iowa. This has been a difficult year. I thought coming into the season this was going to be an NCAA tournament team. I said as much and I believe that there was enough on this squad that they were going to get it done. It has not gone that way. There's been tough losses. There's been blown leads.

Starting point is 00:11:41 There's been big opportunities earlier this year. We mentioned the Michigan game, the Iowa State game and how well it stretches. They played for the first 12 minutes of the game against Wisconsin on the road. They played great. And then they didn't. The wheels fell off out west. Oh, when Freeman has shut it down. Now Thelwell's hurt. We know all season long, the Peyton Sanford and Josh Dix, both of those guys have been banged up. It's been a trying year. It's also been a year where Fran has had a lot of his family gone. And as a son goes through his final season of high school basketball before getting ready to depart to Butler, we have seen a different Fram McAfee, as we talked about a lot. Stoic, certainly not as agitated, not as red-faced. We don't see the same frame of Caffrey that we've seen in the past. And though that started to change a year ago,

Starting point is 00:12:30 it's gone to a completely different level this season. Times like comatose. I don't think it's a stretch to say we're seeing a different frame of Caffrey. Is that suddenly in his mid-60s, he matured, he changed? It's highly doubtful that that happened. I guess you could go down that path if you wanted to, but something is different. And it led to me looking at Framicaffrey and seeing that kind of emotion. Look, we didn't see that kind of emotion

Starting point is 00:13:00 when Patrick was going through cancer treatments. We didn't see that kind of emotion with guys that were incredibly important to the program. That's not Fran. We see it with Kirk Ferentz, right? We see the tears. And we saw more and more of the tears that went on. But we also saw that guy with Kirk Ferentz when he was in his 40s and 50s, not just late in his career as we've seen recently. That's always been a part of the DNA, the coaching DNA of Kirk Ferentz. Not the case with Philly.

Starting point is 00:13:26 East Coast, Philly tough, white magic. Raymond Caffrey, that is not an emotional guy. He's got that chip on his shoulder. He's got that toughness component. And it led to two thoughts. Either it was just that. It's been a trying season. It's been frustrating.

Starting point is 00:13:43 And finally seeing a group down two starters get a win on the surface, you could understand that. It's been a trying season. It's been frustrating. And finally seeing a group down two starters get a win on the surface, you could understand that. But they've had moments like that. They've had big victories like this that seemingly come out of nowhere. And we haven't seen Fram McAfee act like that. Leads to the speculation. Fram McAfee. Does he know something that we in the public don't know? Does he know that it's coming to the end? Does he know he's in Iowa City? Does he know something we don't? That is not the Framicaffery that we're used to and because of that I completely understand why people are thinking that because I had the exact same thought.

Starting point is 00:14:30 We're not used to seeing that for Freya McCaffrey and because of that I think a lot of people are wondering does he know that the end is near? Does he know that they have come to an agreement? Has Beth Getz already let him know that it's not going to happen. It's speculation. This is no insight. This is no insider knowledge by any means. That's not what this is.

Starting point is 00:14:52 But it's a thought that at minimum I think bears a little bit of look because we're just not used to it, right? We're not used to seeing Fray McCaffrey do those types of things. And yet we did on that one. This team the rest of the year. So another road trip coming up this weekend. On Sunday, they'll go to Maryland. Maryland is playing well. They got a big one themselves tonight against Nebraska

Starting point is 00:15:16 on the road before coming back home. Maryland is a tournament team. Maryland is a lot of people's team that they're picking. If you're looking for a dark horse in the big 10, maybe to make a run to an elite eight, the Terps are getting a lot of people's team that they're picking if you're looking for a dark horse in the Big Ten maybe to make a run You know to an elite eight the Terps are getting a lot of the conversation We'll talk a little bit more about the matchup It's unlikely that I was gonna win they're projected to be a 12-point underdog in this one

Starting point is 00:15:36 I was still even with that is now projected to be underdogs in five of the last seven games that they have remaining In the Big Ten by the last seven so seven games left. What would they have to do to get back on the bubble? They probably got to go five and two, which seems like a stretch. So not only beating Oregon and Washington at home, Ducks were in the top 15 for a long time this season. They've fallen on hard times. Washington's probably the worst team in the Big 10 this year and certainly our bystanders. So that means, alright put those two in the in the win column. You got to find three wins out of this group. At Maryland where you're a 12-point underdog. At Illinois you're also a 12-point

Starting point is 00:16:17 underdog. At Northwestern, Barnheiser banged up, maybe. You get Michigan State at home, are banged up, maybe. You get Michigan State at home, it's a home game, okay. And then at Nebraska, look I am not predicting or projecting that I was going to do anything close to this. But a little bit of hope, a glimmer of hope, all it took was one road victory right, right back on the bandwagon again. Dix, Sanford shoot the ball well, knock down shots. They lead the scoring load. What we've seen out of some of these younger guys, and remember, it's still a young team. Yeah, Sanford, he's a senior.

Starting point is 00:16:56 Freeman is, Dix, excuse me, is a junior. But outside of that, Harding, sophomore. Traore, sophomore. Price Sanford, sophomore. DiMelli, sophomore the belly sophomore Riley Moby juniors barely played We'll see I Don't anticipate it. I don't expect it But I got that glimmer Maybe just maybe they can go on a run the likelihood is this is gonna end maybe a postseason team

Starting point is 00:17:22 What other things speak to the postseason? I saw the jokes were out there. NIT, here we come. Remember, there is a difference this year as it pertains to postseason at a new tournament. And this is not the CBI or the CIT. That's not what this is. There is a new tournament called the Crown. And the Crown basketball tournament

Starting point is 00:17:44 is an event that's being put on by Fox. Fox is putting this on. It's going to be not right away after the season concludes. It's going to be towards the Sweet 16 Elite 8 Final Four of that period of time. 16 teams are going to make their way to Las Vegas. It's a single elimination tournament, 16 teams in the bracket, but it's going to be comprised of teams from the Big Ten the Big 12 and the Big East who has key contracts with Fox the Big Ten the Big 12 and the Big East. So instead of seeing Iowa Indiana State, Iowa Valparaiso in the opening round of the NIT. Now with a little bit of time maybe to plan to get out to Vegas, Iowa likely is going to be in this tournament. I believe that the Big Ten is going to push very

Starting point is 00:18:33 much for their teams to enter this as opposed to going to the NIT. Don't know exactly how it's gonna work and in fact we should do a little more investigative work about the way that this is going to look. But if you're thinking it's NIT or bust, watch out. Might have something coming out your way. We continue Lockdown Hawkeyes, more basketball talk. Plus we got some football coming your way as we got some invitees to the NFL Combine. Talking football and women's hoops as they get ready for Rutgers tonight on the Lockdown Hawkeyes podcast. Back one final time Locked On Hawkeyes, I'm Trent Condon. Thanks for being with us in making Locked On Hawkeyes your first listen every day. So tonight it will be the Iowa

Starting point is 00:19:21 women against Rutgers. This is going to be a different one than what we saw on the uh on the side last night on the men's side of things. Rutgers is not even a top 100 team uh at the efficiency numbers from Bart Torvik. Uh we talked a lot about this Iowa team. Look, I was projected according to Torvik's numbers by 21.7 points. This should be an easy blowout victory. This in the conclusion against Wisconsin. Both games at home, those are the easy victories and tonight should be the same. I mean this team is playing on both ends of the floor. The freshmen all knowing the roles. It's

Starting point is 00:19:55 been incredibly fun to watch everybody grow and now during this five game winning streak which should come a six tonight. But then we go to next Monday and put this on the calendar if you haven't already. Maybe you need to take an extra long lunch. Maybe you need to block off some time and make sure you don't have any meetings happening. But on Monday, that Ohio State matchup, a Buckeye program that wants to get Iowa in the worst way, that's an 11 a.m. Central time tip off. It is President's Day. It will be broadcast on Big Fox so that's the reason for it but 11 a.m. if you missed that one

Starting point is 00:20:32 that road trip out to Columbus next Monday will be early early tip off for that one. Then the following weekend it's UCLA coming to town and then the road trip out to Michigan before the aforementioned matchup against Wisconsin. Iowa should dominate this game. This should be an easy victory. I don't see any major concerns about it.

Starting point is 00:20:52 Just keep it rolling. Keep Lucy Olson doing her thing. You feel really good about that and the way in the play that we've seen on her. Maybe get a little bit. She struggled last time out to attend from the floor. Get her going early on. I think you're going to see plenty of that on the cave, the hot shooting that we struggled last time out to attend from the floor, get her going early on. I think you're going to see plenty of that on the cave, the hot shooting that we saw last

Starting point is 00:21:08 time out. This team, they're fun again. It's fun to watch what they've been able to do. Losing's never fun. Winning's a lot more fun. And it's good to see that we should have a an easy victory you'd anticipate tonight. We will be back with you though with that one coming up with an instant reaction podcast coming up this evening into tomorrow and we'll have you covered on that one. Also want to mention what we have with the NFL draft combines. So no surprise that Iowa has a number of invitees.

Starting point is 00:21:37 Caleb Johnson has been invited. The fine running back for Iowa and I can't wait to see the way that he tests and some of the numbers that we're going to get. Luke Lachey going to be there at the tight end position, going to continue on the long lineage of course the great tight ends at Iowa. Connor Colby gets an invite was never a guard a tackle but played really well at guard him. He'll be a guy potentially that could hear his name called a little bit later on. Y.A. Black also gonna be there for the Hawkeyes along with Jay Higgins and then a couple of defensive backs, Sebastian Castro and Jamari Harris. So all those guys got the invites there about 350 invites that are given out. That is big

Starting point is 00:22:14 obviously for those guys to get their opportunity at the NFL. Really looking forward to that. We'll continue with the coverage. Scott Dockerman is going to be at the combine. Always great to catch up with Scott Dockerman and talk about what's going on on that front. We got you covered here on Locked On Hawkeyes. Your team every day, that's what we do on Locked On Hawkeyes. Thanks for being with us. What a big victory for the Iowa men. In the grand scheme of things, does it change anything? Probably not, but for a night, it's good to have fun with that squad and we were able to do it with a win against Rutgers. We'll be back with you as we are each and every day tomorrow.

Starting point is 00:22:49 Until then, go Hawks.

Locked On Hawkeyes - Daily Podcast On Iowa Hawkeyes Football & Basketball - Iowa Hawkeyes' first road win: A turning point for the season?

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