Our extended study of the University of Iowa’s history in football and basketball has turned up some interesting patterns and revelations.
USC’s two most important sports figures, football architect Howard Jones and basketball-baseball wizard Sam Barry, both coached at Iowa before they coached at USC. Two Iowa coaches wanted to move west and coach in a different part of the country. The West Coast was alluring and attractive for them, and they changed the course of college sports history by turning USC into a sports juggernaut.
Decades later, Iowa coaches once again felt the pull of going west and forging special achievements in the Pacific-8, later to become the Pacific-10 and now the Pac-12 Conference.
Ralph Miller coached at Iowa. He then coached at Oregon State and won four Pac-10 titles in Corvallis, nearly reaching the Final Four in 1982. He lost to Patrick Ewing and Georgetown in the Elite Eight.
Lute Olson coached at Iowa. He took the Hawkeyes to the Final Four in 1980 but then went to Tucson to build a dynasty at Arizona.
One other Iowa coach of note worked in the Pac-10 in addition to working in Iowa City, but this coach switched the order of things. Whereas Miller and Olson coached at Iowa first and then moved west, Dr. Tom Davis coached at Stanford in the mid-1980s and then went to Iowa in 1986. He is the last coach to guide the Hawkeyes to the Elite Eight (1987) and the Sweet 16 (1999).
There is something about Iowa and the west. Next year, USC and Iowa will begin to compete on a regular basis in the Big Ten.
Below is our podcast episode with Hawkeyes Wire editor Josh Helmer on Lute Olson and Ralph Miller:
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