Penn hires former Iowa coach Fran McCaffery to lift fallen program back into Ivy contention
Penn fired Steve Donahue earlier this month after the Quakers went 8-19 in his ninth season on the job.
McCaffery played three seasons with the Quakers and led the Ivy League in assists (105) and steals (51) as a senior in 1981-82. Penn went 36-6 in Ivy League play across McCaffery's three seasons, winning three conference titles. He played in two NCAA Tournaments.
McCaffery hopes he can find that kind of success again at Penn, which has made the tournament only twice since Fran Dunphy left after 2006. Penn made one NCAA Tournament appearance during Donahue's tenure when it won the Ivy League Tournament on their home court at the Palestra in Philadelphia in 2018. As a No. 16 seed, the team lost to top-seeded Kansas in the first round.
The Quakers went 131-130 overall and 63-63 in conference play since Donahue took over in 2015.
'My vision is to return Penn to prominence in the Ivy League and beyond and bring an exciting style of play to the Palestra,' McCaffery said.
The 65-year-old McCaffery was Iowa's all-time wins leader and longest-tenured coach in program history after 15 years at the school.
McCaffery was head coach at Lehigh, UNC Greensboro and Siena before former Iowa athletic director Gary Barta hired him in 2010. He led the Hawkeyes to eight 20-win seasons and won a game in four of seven NCAA Tournament appearances from 2012-13 to 2022-23.
McCaffery is 548-384 overall, a .588 winning percentage.
Iowa was ranked as high as No. 3 nationally during both the 2016 and 2021 seasons. The Hawkeyes were ranked for 16 consecutive weeks in 2019, the final nine weeks of the 2020 season, went wire-to-wire in 2021 in the top 15 of the AP Poll for the first time since the 1989 campaign, and ranked No. 16 in the final poll in 2022.
'Fran has had success at every level of Division I and is passionate about restoring our program to glory,' Penn athletic director Alanna Wren said Thursday. 'His energy and enthusiasm for leading young men was apparent throughout the process and he has proven to be committed to player development and relationship-building with his student-athletes throughout his storied career.'Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
USA Today
5 hours ago
- USA Today
Michigan football head coach Sherrone Moore says 'no more flag planting' for Wolverines
Michigan football will no longer plant or run on field with team flag after games The vitriol between Ohio State and Michigan may have never been at a higher level than what it is today, and that's saying a lot since Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler had it at the nuclear level during the "ten-year war." The Wolverines beat the Buckeyes for the fourth-straight time last season, and after the game, men with grudges and axes to grind met at midfield when Michigan tried to plant a Block M flag in the middle of the field inside the 'Shoe. That was after the Buckeye players allowed the same to happen after a 2022 win by the maize and blue. And, might I add, that team heard about it from former players and from fans alike on allowing that to happen on the banks of the Olentangy. So, that wasn't about to happen again, and instead, tempers got the best of both sides. The Michigan flag was ripped off its pole by Jack Sawyer, pepper spray was used by Columbus's finest, and both teams were fined $100,000 for their part in the postgame Donnybrook that ensued. Michigan head coach Sherrone Moore addressed the incident immediately following the game, calling for both sides to be better going forward, and has decided to take it further after being asked about it at Big Ten media days. He is putting a stop to flag planting as we know it. 'We definitely addressed it. There'll be no more flag planting. There'll be no more grabbing the flag," Moore said. "Our new tradition -- what we do when we win a game -- it's go meet the band, go sing our Victors, and stay over there until after the other team departs. That's how we'll operate. Shake hands after the game, show sportsmanship, be cordial. A lot of guys in college football know each other. All these guys, they're kids. At the end of the day, they're 17 to 22-year-old kids, and most of them are friends. A lot of them talk before the game. So let them have that, but then as a team, go be together as a team and leave as a team.' This is a good move and one that college football should adopt going forward. Rivalries are great and there's always going to be some tempers that flare, but creating a situation that can instigate further emotional responses don't need to be a part of the game. Sportsmanship can say a lot about the culture of a coach, player, and team, and sometimes that has to be displayed in winning and losing. Let's hope that it's Ohio State that has to refrain from doing unsportsmanlike things after beating Michigan and putting an end to the four-game skid the program has against That Team Up North. Contact/Follow us @BuckeyesWire on X (formerly Twitter) and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Ohio State news, notes and opinion. Follow Phil Harrison on X.
Miami Herald
6 hours ago
- Miami Herald
Saniyah Hall, No. 1 recruit in 2026, commits to USC
Saniyah Hall, considered the No. 1 prospect in the women's basketball Class of 2026, committed to Southern California on Friday. "I would say it felt like home," Hall said in her announcement on ESPN. "The girls there are so fun to be around. The coaches ... have high support, but (head coach Lindsay Gottlieb) is definitely there to just support me and I've built a relationship with her -- she's a great coach." The commitment means the Trojans have signed three of the past four players ranked No. 1 in the country by ESPNW, following JuJu Watkins (2023) and Jasmine "Jazzy" Davidson (2025). Hall chose USC over rival UCLA and North Carolina. Hall is listed at 6-foot-2 and can play guard or forward. A native of Lorain, Ohio, she transferred from Florida's Montverde Academy to SPIRE Academy in Ohio for her senior year of high school. She was named MVP at the FIBA U19 Women's World Cup this summer, where she played alongside Davidson on Team USA as they won gold. Hall averaged 19.9 points, 6.4 rebounds, 2.0 assists and 2.9 steals in the tournament. Gottlieb has led USC to No. 1 seeds in the NCAA Tournament in consecutive years. The Trojans fell in the Elite Eight both times. --Field Level Media Field Level Media 2023 - All Rights Reserved
Fox Sports
6 hours ago
- Fox Sports
Who Really Runs the Big Ten: Ohio State or Michigan?
Ohio State runs the Big Ten — or does it? The Buckeyes want to be heard on this point: They're defending nothing. They're chasing everything. And everything better mean Michigan. It's a sentiment that most competitors would embrace. Enter the silo. Silence the outside. Secure and protect focus on what's to come, not what has come to pass. However, that's not what we do with defending national champions, especially when they've not beaten their arch nemesis since 2019 and haven't won the league championship in a conference they claim to rule since 2020. Not only has Michigan — Ohio State's enemy now and forever — won three of the last four Big Ten titles and claimed the 2023 national title, but the Wolverines have watched an entire class of Buckeyes go winless against a program they refer to as "That Team Up North." The best tact, the best take, in any conversation where points must be made, is sharpening the truth into an iron point, especially when sliced at a rival. And that is what Michigan defensive end Derrick Moore did on Thursday when asked what he thought about Ohio State winning its most recent national title. "First, I'd like to congratulate them on the win," Moore said. "But you know it's not a real win if y'all [Ohio State] ain't beat us. Moore went on to elaborate on his statement, noting the first-year 12-team College Football Playoff and where the Buckeyes would have ended up had it not been for the expanded field. "If the playoff expansion wasn't around, they wouldn't have won the national championship. So we pretty much look at it like, y'all had a nice little, easy run. But we helped y'all along the way. We pretty much helped y'all build back up. But after that, they dominated everybody that came in front of them, so, I've got to give all the credit to them." Ahem: Where's the lie? Ohio State, being the No. 8 seed, would likely have been left out of a four-team playoff. And that loss to an unranked seven-win Michigan team would've slammed the door on a conversation to get the Buckeyes in among most rational fans and, more importantly, a rational selection committee. Remember this: Michigan ran the table in 2023. The Wolverines ran through Ohio State without their head coach on the sideline, right through their competition in the Big Ten title game and over Nick Saban's Alabama team and Kalen DeBoer's Washington team to win the title. If not all national champions are alike, 2023 Michigan looks a lot like 2018 Clemson and 2024 Ohio State looks a lot like 2007 LSU. It's one thing to win the national title. It's another for Ohio State or Michigan to beat the other, and that is by design. For so long, we've lived for rivalry games because it wasn't that long ago that we counted votes to decide who the national champion was. No one was really playing for one as much as they were playing for the right to point at someone else in a game that mattered more than it should and say, "I beat you." That's what Ohio State-Michigan is all about. It's about eight consecutive losses from 2012 to 2021. It's about Urban Meyer never knowing what it's like to lose to Michigan, and it's about Ryan Day knowing those four losses to the Wolverines might mean more to OSU fans than his one national title. It's about red X's on all words that begin with the letter "M" during the week of The Game. It's about 62-39 (2018), 56-27 (2019) for Ohio State, followed by 42-27 (2021) and 45-23 (2022) for Michigan. It's about Michigan closing the gap from laughable in 2020 to "We Own You" in 2024. It is reasonable that comparing how you win is as important as winning, especially given the Midwest penchant for fair play and taking the rough road, because it's the right way. And that brings us to the obvious rebuttal, where Ohio State might look at Michigan and ask, sincerely, "didn't they cheat?" Here's what we know: The NCAA launched an investigation early in the 2023 season amid allegations that Michigan used a robust in-person scouting and sign-stealing operation. The Wolverines served a penalty for this in the same season for which they won the national title, as the Big Ten suspended Jim Harbaugh for the final three regular-season games of the year after its investigation concluded Michigan had violated conference sportsmanship rules via an impermissible in‑person scouting operation. Just two months ago, according to reports, Michigan proposed suspending current coach Sherrone Moore for the third and fourth games of the 2025 season for deleting a thread of text messages as the scandal broke. Then, this past week, Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti reportedly sent a letter to the NCAA Committee on Infractions suggesting that Michigan's football program should not face more sanctions stemming from the sign-stealing scheme. I think what galls most folks isn't that Michigan wasn't punished, but that the program was not punished harshly enough for its transgression. After all, Ohio State likely lost a chance to play for the 2012 national title because, after a 12-0 season, it was forced to serve a bowl ban because players sold memorabilia. Today, that feels quaint. Had some of these events not occurred, the question would remain: Who runs the Big Ten? In a season where the conference could win a third national title in as many years for the first time in the CFP era and in a league that Michigan helped found in 1896, which now features four programs in their second year as members, the consistent excellence of Penn State and the awakening of Indiana, now is the moment for the conference's two best programs over the last five decades to throw down a gauntlet. Come Nov. 29 at the Big House in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the last two national champs will meet, and we'll look at the scoreboard to see who really runs this league, and, perhaps, the sport. RJ Young is a national college football writer and analyst for FOX Sports and the host of the podcast "The Number One College Football Show." Follow him at @RJ_Young . Want great stories delivered right to your inbox? Create or log in to your FOX Sports account , and follow leagues, teams and players to receive a personalized newsletter daily! FOLLOW Follow your favorites to personalize your FOX Sports experience College Football recommended Item 1 of 3 Get more from the College Football Follow your favorites to get information about games, news and more
