This schedule seems about right for this team. A bunch of sure feel good wins and a few tough eggs mixed in. With a team young at PG and Center these will help ease the freshman into D1. I’m not worried that the upper classman won’t be ready for the big games. They have been battle tested and will show up. I would like to see a huge upgrade in scheduling in ’14 and beyond.

That is a contender for the worst major D-1 non-con schedule for sure. Second consecutive .500 season is guaranteed. Get your season tickets now!

Put the blinders on and have a swig of kool-aid. I can’t wait to hear the hype. It is probably an appropriate schedule for the 88th ranked Sagarin team. Total yawn induction.

This is a logical continuation of the Fran policy to recruit big, play easy teams, and above all… image. I give him credit for his recruiting ability, I will believe his strengthening of the schedule when I see it. For a guy who is scared to take a trip to Cedar Falls, I would say this kind of non-conference schedule is probably the new normal for the Hawkeyes.

I think it is well understood that non-conference schedules in college basketball are to serve one purpose above all–to prepare the team for conference play. How one goes about that differs from team to team. A team like this year’s Indiana needs a tough non-con schedule because they have a ton of talent and thus are looking at winning the conference and being a serious national championship contender. Iowa is not looking at those goals. Iowa is trying to position itself as a winning program again. At the end of the year the main thing people talk about it wins and losses. If Iowa plays a monster non-con schedule and performs admirably but goes .500 and then goes .500 in the Big Ten, they’re going nowhere in the post-season. But, if they go undefeated or nearly so with a soft non-con and then go .500 in the Big Ten they have an outside chance at the Big Dance and will be a lock for the NIT. That would be the logical next step for Iowa.

So I consider this brilliant strategy by Fran. I also expect next year he will sprinkle in some more difficulty. But he’s three years away from the old days of scheduling. And rightly so. This was a basketball program on life support after Lickliter, who has proved he was a monumental program killer by essentially being unemployable.

So we didn’t schedule Duke, North Carolina, Kentucky and Kansas in the pre-season. Big deal. There are still teams in there that can give us a push in UNI, ISU and Virginia Tech. Coppin State was down last year, but they have been a regular participant in March Madness in the past, and will again.

This crew needs to have its confidence built up, not treated the way our Olympic basketball team has treated its opposition in London (which is essentially how a baby treats a diaper) and getting destroyed physiclly and mentally by November 1. There will be plenty of tough games in the B1G, and 20 or 22 wins overall will get us in the NCAA for the first time in God knows how long. That can only happen if these guys beleive they can win at home and on the road. Getting serially crushed in the pre-season will not accomplish that. In Fran We Trust. All others pay cash!

I didn’t say this in the original text, but I will now:

I certainly don’t expect a killer non-con schedule at this point in McCaffery’s program. That would be foolish. But three teams from the MEAC? That’s overstocking the tank with minnows.

I would like to have seen maybe another Missouri Valley Conference team, and someone from the Horizon League. Not necessarily great teams, but competitive programs from the Midwest rather than Texas-Pan American or Texas A&M-Corpus Christi or Howard.

This isn’t a federal case, just fodder for the dog days of summer. Most big-conference teams play schedules like this. And I have no reason to doubt Iowa’s skeds will toughen up as its team does.

Don’t really know why we are importing so many teams from the South and East. We do have the Missouri Valley and other leagues closer to home which would keep money in the midwest. I wonder is they are asking for home and home contracts with Iowa which Fran doesn’t want to commit to at this time.

I think Fran has made several very intelligent decisions regarding the program. The first is building the image of excitement. By doing nothing more than choosing an up-tempo style of play and using more superlatives in interviews than most coaches he has excited recruits into playing for him and excited the fan base into believing in the program once again. Up-tempo style is the foundation of the program, recruiting and a believing fan base are its substance. Finally, a soft schedule is his insurance policy; Fran knows that a year of progression followed by a year of regression could mean his job (this is what Iowa did to Lickliter) so if he can schedule a few wins to stack the deck in his favor, pretty savvy move.