By Pat Harty

IOWA CITY, Iowa – I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this season that the Iowa men’s basketball team was on the verge of unraveling.

The naysayers started to chirp after back-to-back losses to Iowa State and Michigan in December, and when Iowa started 0-3 in Big Ten play.

They kept chirping when Iowa lost to Maryland 69-67 at home on Jan. 24, and after losses at Penn State and at Maryland on Feb. 8 and Feb. 14, respectively.

But now they are mostly silent since Iowa has won four of its last five games and has a realistic chance of making the NCAA Tournament for the fifth straight season.

Iowa (18-12, 10-9 Big Ten) will close out the regular season against second-place Illinois (22-8, 13-6) on Sunday at Carver-Hawkeye Arena.

A win would go a long way in helping to solidify an NCAA Tournament berth and would also be Iowa’s 11^th conference win, matching last season’s win total in conference play.

Should Iowa go on to make the NCAA Tournament this season, a case could be made for this being Fran McCaffery’s best coaching performance in his 14 seasons as the head Hawk.

With everything this team has had to endure on and off the court, including four players losing a grandparent, and with the holes it has had to climb out from on the court, to stay the course and to be peaking at the right time is a worthy accomplishment.

Fran McCaffery also had to replace three starters from last season, including All-America forward Kris Murray, who now plays for the Portland Trail Blazers.

Senior forward Patrick McCaffery, who is Fran McCaffery’s son, was asked Wednesday if he feels this is his father’s best coaching performance at Iowa.

“I’ve never really thought about it because he approaches every day and every practice and every game the same way,” Patrick McCaffery said. “The personnel changes, and he might call different plays that cater to different people. But overall he’s been doing this for over forty years, so he’s probably not going to change very much.

“He can be pretty stubborn sometimes. He just approaches every day the same way. And so I think that’s what has led him to have as much consistency as he’s had throughout his career and win as many games as he has.”

Fran McCaffery, who is signed though the 2028 season, is Iowa’s all-time winningest head coach with 279 wins and his teams have posted upper-division finishes in the Big Ten in 10 of the last 11 seasons.

Iowa also has earned 10 postseason tournament bids under Fran McCaffery and won the 2021 Big Ten Tournament.

The biggest criticism of Fran McCaffery is that he has failed to lead Iowa beyond the second round of the NCAA Tournament.

But he is also one of just 14 head coaches to lead at least four different Division I teams to the NCAA Tournament.

The odds of Iowa making the NCAA Tournament appeared to be slim until this late-season surge.

“It’s easy to point out how at the beginning of the year we sucked and now we’ve worked our way up to be pretty good,” Patrick McCaffery said. “But I think a lot of that is you have to go through things and learn and grow from certain situations. And there’s things you can’t simulate in practice and we found that out.

“But we’ve learned, and we’ve grown, and I think that’s all you can ask for as a coach, and as a player.”

Patrick McCaffery will be among four seniors honored before the start of Sunday’s game. The others are graduate forward Ben Krikke, guard Tony Perkins and walk-on Javone Cater.

This will be Krikke’s second Senior Day ceremony as he also was also honored last season while playing for Valparaiso.

The question is will this be the final Senior Day for Patrick McCaffery and for Tony Perkins as Hawkeyes.

They both have a free Covid year and could return next season, but neither has made a final decision.

Patrick McCaffery, who has had to overcome cancer and bouts with anxiety, seemed to indicate that he is leaning towards not returning next season, but he also didn’t rule it out.

“As of right now the plan is that I’m going to move on, but anything is possible in this day and age,” Patrick McCaffery said. “It just depends on the circumstances.”

As for his father, Fran McCaffery said recently that he has no plans to retire from coaching.

Iowa has a strong freshman class and will have some other key players returning next season, including junior forward Payton Sandfort and sophomore guard Josh Dix.

Forward Owen Freeman is also the leading candidate for Big Ten Freshman of the Year as he has won the weekly award nine times this season, which is second most in Big Ten history.

With the exceptions of Krikke and reserve forward Even Brauns joining the team as graduate transfers, Iowa’s current roster has mostly been built from the ground up with high school recruits.

Fran McCaffery prefers it that way because it helps to build team chemistry and a sustainable culture.

Iowa’s culture has helped the current team persevere on and off the court.

“We always talk about it’s a family and I think a lot of people throw that around and sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t,” Fran McCaffery said. “But it’s a very close-knit group. It’s a connected group. They care about each other. They really like each other.

“We have an experienced staff. We have guys that have been here, and it’s a long journey. We talk about that all the time, starting from June until March. There’s a lot of ups and downs, both on the court and in the locker room, but also personally. We all have families and deal with that. So, we’re all there for each other. That’s how you continue to improve, and it makes its all worthwhile, I guess at the end.”