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Watching tape of Northwestern to prepare his Iowa basketball team for Wednesday’s game with the Wildcats is taking Hawkeye coach Fran McCaffery back in time.
McCaffery has competed against the back cut-heavy Princeton style attack deployed by Northwestern since he was playing at Penn more than three decades ago.
“If you don’t play well on the concentration stuff, they’ll carve you up,” McCaffery said. “I’ve been going against this since 1979. Billy (Carmody, the Wildcats’ 11th-year coach) has guys who understand it, execute it, and play it as well as anybody on our schedule.”
The Wildcats bring a 10-4 record to Carver-Hawkeye Arena and if Northwestern hopes to erase its name from the short list of long-term Division I schools which have never played an NCAA tourney game, a win at Iowa is almost a must for the Wildcats. Northwestern is 2-3 on the road this season, including losses at Purdue and Illinois in Big Ten play.
The preparation for this games differs from most because of the unique style Iowa will see from Northwestern on both ends of the court.
“If you have a one-day prep, you’re in big trouble,” McCaffery said. “If you have more than one day, it’s still hard.”
McCaffery appreciates the way Carmody has recruited to the system, but plays to the strengths of the individual players Northwestern puts on the floor.
“He seems to get big guys who can shoot. He has some serious quickness in the backcourt,” McCaffery said. “This team runs as much as any of the Princeton-style teams I’ve watched over the years, especially with (point guard Michael) Thompson.”
After leading the league in scoring a year ago, the Wildcats have topped 90 points on four occasions this season and are currently third in the Big Ten with their scoring average of 77 points per game.

With seven minutes left in Sunday’s 75-52 loss at Purdue, the Hawkeyes trailed by 26 points and Matt Gatens was the only starter still on the floor for Iowa.
Coach Fran McCaffery gave the rest of his lineup a chance to think about the effort they put into the first Big Ten road game of the season.
“When you look at the game, it’s pretty simple,” McCaffery said. “When you go out and do not compete any harder against the No. 10 team in the country than we competed today, that is what is going to happen,” McCaffery prefaced his postgame remarks with. “Purdue impressed me last year (when his Siena team played the Boilermakers in the NCAA tourney) with how hard they competed. We tried to get our guys ready for that kind of effort. Obviously, we didn’t do a good enough job of that.”
There was no shortage of shortcomings for Iowa in its most lopsided loss of the season.
The Hawkeyes had more turnovers than assists for the fifth time in six games, were out-rebounded by Purdue 36-29 and endured their third-worst shooting effort of the season.
Any thoughts of a combined 12-of-32 effort from the field by JaJuan Johnson and E’Twaun Moore helping Iowa were smothered beneath the sea of 3-pointers that Ryne Smith continued to bury Big Ten opponents with.
Purdue has found a third scorer in the junior who has hit 18-of-27 shots from 3-point range in four Big Ten games.
“We marked him, but his first five 3s were wide open,” McCaffery said. “That can’t happen.”
McCaffery found few bright spots Sunday. He cited the effort of Gatens, the only Hawkeye to see more than 30 minutes of playing time, and he liked the energy that Andrew Brommer and Devon Archie provided off the bench. Brommer hit 3-of-5 shots to finish with six points while Archie finished with eight rebounds and three blocks in 20 minutes of action.
McCaffery isn’t worried about his team suffering any lingering impact from Sunday’s effort, or lack there of, when Northwestern visits on Wednesday.
“I think this team will respond,” he said. “If we lose Wednesday, it will be because we were beaten by a better team. I do think our guys will work harder, play harders. I think we’ll learn from this.”

Iowa basketball coach Fran McCaffery spent Thursday night in Sioux City, watching Hawkeye recruit Mike Gessell of South Sioux City, Neb., play in a shootout-type event against MOC-Floyd Valley.
He saw Gessell score 27 points as the first-year Iowa coach learns the lay of the recruiting landscape around the Hawkeye state.
By Friday afternoon, McCaffery was fielding general questions — NCAA rules don’t allow him to talk specific individuals — about how recruiting is going for the Iowa program.
“The thing with recruiting is they can always be going good or they can always be going bad until you get somebody that you really like and then they have to be good,” McCaffery said.
“Sometimes, you get somebody you like and they’re not any good anyway. That’s the thing about recruiting. How many times have you heard, this is a top-10 recruiting class, whatever, and sometimes the guys nobody ever heard of end up being great.”
McCaffery said Iowa is being “very well received” as it searches for future talent.
McCaffery said playing games has helped demonstrate to recruits what his program is all about from a style and philosophy standpoint.
“They watch the players to see if they enjoy playing in that type of system. Are they having fun? Are they enjoying what we’re doing? Are they buying in? They’re getting a glimpse of things I would think would impact a prospect’s decision,” McCaffery said. “I think from that standpoint, it’s been very positive.”
McCaffery also likes what he has seen so far of high school basketball in the state.
“I’ve been impressed by the coaching. I think we’ve got really good players. In sheer numbers in terms of population, how many of them are going to be high, high major players? There’s going to be some, we’ve always had some and we’ve had some great ones but it’s not like there is going to be 50 in any given year,” McCaffery said. “There’s going to be some, and we’ve got to get some of those kids to come here.”

Purdue basketball coach Matt Painter doesn’t expect his 11th-ranked basketball team to overlook Iowa when the teams meet Sunday at Mackey Arena.
He suspects the Boilermakers saw all they needed to see when they watched Iowa hang with Ohio State on Tuesday night.
“I’m sure they all saw how Iowa played and put themselves in a position to win against an Ohio State team that could be the best team in the country,” Painter said during a teleconference this morning.
“Our guys respect Iowa. I feel like we have a team that can beat anybody in the country, but I feel like we can get beat by anybody as well. We have to stay on top of them.”
Purdue faced Fran McCaffery’s Siena team in the 2010 NCAA tourney so Painter is familiar with the style that Iowa now plays and he has been impressed with what he has seen from the Hawkeyes in their Big Ten-opening games against Illinois and Ohio State.
“I think probably the most encouraging thing for Iowa is that they were in both games and in a position to make plays down the stretch against two very good teams, playing one without Eric May and the other with (limited time from) their athletic freshman,” Painter said, referring to Melsahn Basabe.
“They’re a team that is developing and has very good pieces. … They’ve got a physical basketball team and a good rebounding team which is a concern of ours.”

Several hundred fans gave the Iowa basketball team a rousing ovation as they walked toward the tunnel leading toward their locker room following tonight’s 73-68 loss to Ohio State.
While Iowa did give the second-ranked Buckeyes more of a tussle than many expected, coach Fran McCaffery and Hawkeye players weren’t interested in talking about moral victories following the game.
“The way I address that with the team was this: We’re not satisfied, okay. Am I proud of the effort? Absolutely. You know, did we get better tonight? We got better tonight. And we’re getting closer and closer to being where we have to be to where we can beat a team of this caliber. From that standpoint, it’s good, but we’re not satisfied,” McCaffery said.
McCaffery was asked during his postgame news conference if the effort the Hawkeyes turned in was their best 40-minute performance of the season.
“I don’t know about that. I think we’ve played better,” he said. “I think considering who we played against, I think it was a pretty good 40 minutes.”
McCaffery appreciated the way his team soaked up the game plan, understanding the importance of each possession.
“That’s what is upsetting about that one stretch where we just came apart and I think we didn’t have the same intensity level and concentration,” McCaffery said.
The five-minute drought midway through the second half sent OSU on a 16-0 run, a time when the Buckeyes benefited from five Iowa turnovers.
“We’ll go back and beat ourselves up,” McCaffery said. “Should we have taken another timeout in there? Should we have taken another one? Should we have taken one earlier? Should we have run a set play?”
McCaffery continues to appreciate the resiliant effort he is getting from his players.
“We’ve got a lot of heart, a lot of character,” he said. “I’ve said this from the day I got here. I love these kids. They give me everything they have. Yeah, I get frustrated. Everything’s new. But somehow, some way, they’re going to keep coming, so I am proud of them for that.”

Iowa basketball coach Fran McCaffery said he is preparing his team for “a tall task” when the Hawkeyes host second-ranked Ohio State on Tuesday night.
To be exact, McCaffery is preparing his team for a 6-foot-9, 280-pound task. The Buckeyes’ Jared Sullinger has averaged a double-double this season and the freshman is surrounded by plenty of veterans who have helped OSU open the season with a 14-0 record.
Five Buckeyes average in double figures and while all have had their moments, McCaffery said everything seemingly points back to Sullinger.
“When it is all said and done, I think it still resolves around Sullinger because he’s almost impossible to guard one-on-one in the post,” McCaffery said. “If you double him, they have too many shooters around.”
McCaffery said Sullinger will likely be assigned to multiple defenders and will likely see a multitude of defenses from Iowa in the 8 p.m. game, the first of two meetings between the teams in a 15-day span.
“I don’t think you can take one guy and say ‘You’ve got Sullinger,”’ McCaffery said. “There’s not a team in America that could say that. I’m not sure the Lakers could say that.
“You have to deal with this guy, he’s too strong and too gifted. I think you have to keep different people going at him and we’ll have to change defenses. I thionk that’s the only way to deal with a player like that.”