Hawkeye Nation and Hawkeye Report both spoke to Connor McCaffery recently and the oldest son of Iowa head coach Fran McCaffery had some interesting things to say about his future, which could have some notable impacts on not one, but two athletic programs at Iowa. First, McCaffery announced that he intends to play basketball for his father -- and also baseball for Rick Heller at Iowa. McCaffery explained his decision to Hawkeye Nation's Rob Howe:
“I’m still deciding on how it’s going to work out but I will be a part of the baseball team in some way. I want to have a conversation with the baseball coaching staff and my dad and see what we can get figured out. My dad has always been super supportive of me in baseball. He’ll try to work something out to the best of his ability. Obviously, it will be tough deciding which things to sacrifice. But I think that in the end, we can get it to all work out,” Connor said.
McCaffery rose to prominence on the hard court -- he's presently ranked #96 in Rivals' 2017 prospect rankings and #106 in 247 Sports' 2017 recruit rankings -- but he's not bad on the diamond, either. He hit .407 with eight home runs, 33 RBI, a .520 OBP and a .748 slugging percentage and helped lead Iowa City West to a runner-up finish at the Iowa state tournament. He certainly seems to have the skills to help Iowa baseball. The question is how much aid he can provide if he's just a part-timer.
We've seen two-sport athletes at Iowa in the past (Tim Dwight and Bashir Yamini in football and track, Danan Hughes and Bo Porter in football and baseball, to name just a few), but basketball and baseball is a new combination -- and one that seems difficult to make work, at least on paper. For one, the schedules overlap -- Iowa baseball's season gets underway around mid-February, when Iowa hoops is wrapping up the regular season. How long the hoops season lasts depends on how well the team does in the postseason, of course, but basketball could occupy McCaffery for all of March. At the very least he's likely to miss the first few weeks of March; based on Iowa's schedule last year, that could mean missing 14 baseball games, or roughly a third of the season. He'd also be missing a lot of offseason practice time for baseball during the basketball season.
Still, that's a problem for the future -- and one that Connor, his father, and Rick Heller will need to sort out, not us. Heller is certainly aware that McCaffery's priority will be hoops, so if he's still interested in him, he probably has some idea of how to make things work. It helps that baseball requires a bit less understanding and continuity between teammates than basketball -- if you can step in and hit, you can provide value in baseball. Whether he can shift gears so quickly between basketball and baseball and the different skill sets required in each is another matter entirely. But, again, those are problems for the future -- for now, let's ponder how much fun it would be to have a player helping guide not one, but two Iowa teams to success.
The other issue McCaffery discussed was his scholarship status. The consequence of Dale Jones getting a sixth year of eligibility is that Iowa currently has no longer scholarships available for the 2017 recruiting class, which you can see in visual form on our nifty Scholarship Grid page. They have room for Connor McCaffery and... that's it. The Iowa coaches and players weren't necessarily expecting that, as McCaffery indicated to Howe:
“It was kind of unexpected and now we’re kind of jammed up with scholarships,” Connor McCaffery said.
While Iowa technically has no scholarships to offer, they haven't stopped recruiting 2017 prospects, either. They're very much still after big men Malik Williams, Luke Garza, and Jack Nunge. To accommodate one of those players, Iowa will need to free up a scholarship. Iowa has been loathe to just pull scholarships from existing players under McCaffery and that's an approach we wholeheartedly support. It's certainly possible that a scholarship may open up just through the ins and outs of the transfer process -- we saw two players leave the program after last season and transfers are an increasingly common sight in college hoops. But one way to guarantee a scholarship availability would be for Connor McCaffery to walk on at Iowa instead of taking up a scholarship. McCaffery himself seems somewhat open to the idea, per Hawkeye Report:
“We haven’t really talked about it in terms of what if this happens or that happens,” he said. “But, we have talked about some different options, like if I could get an academic scholarship, or maybe a year of prep school, or maybe playing a year of baseball and holding off starting my clock on basketball. Those are some options we have talked about, but we haven’t decided on anything yet.”
The prep school idea is a little weird -- it would open up a scholarship for Iowa, but it would also keep him away from the Iowa hoops program (and the Iowa baseball program, for that matter) -- although it would make it easier for him to play more seasons at Iowa with his brother, Patrick. Likewise, spending a full year playing baseball and waiting to start his basketball career at Iowa also seems a little odd. But using an academic scholarship (if he can earn one, and with a 3.98 GPA he'll have an opportunity to do so if he can raise his ACT score) or being a walk-on for a season or two would allow him to be part of the program and ease Iowa's scholarship burden. (And it's hard to imagine Iowa would need him to be a walk-on for more than one season; it's difficult to believe that Iowa would go through this season and next without a single transfer.)
For his part, McCaffery thinks he should be on scholarship if he deserves a scholarship, as he explained to Hawkeye Report:
“My point of view on all of this is, if I get a scholarship to Iowa, then I would have gotten a scholarship to go somewhere else and my parents wouldn’t have to pay for me to go elsewhere either. I don’t see why it’s different because my dad is the coach and he makes money. I think if you are good enough to get a scholarship, you should get a scholarship.”
He has a point. Not using a scholarship for one year while Iowa deals with a somewhat unexpected scholarship crunch is one thing, but not putting him on scholarship at all during his Iowa career would be another matter. He's good enough to earn a scholarship -- let him be on scholarship. "Hiding" scholarship-caliber players as walk-ons is challenging with a basketball roster, too -- it's difficult enough to spread playing time between 13 scholarship athletes, let alone walk-ons who are every bit as good (or better) than the scholarship athletes.
Iowa's basketball recruiting for 2017 is still in a bit of a weird space, but Connor McCaffery's comments do give us some insight into how things might play out -- and give us some intriguing ideas about a potential two-sport career for him at Iowa. And, hey, why not watch his junior highlights (via Courtside Films) if you haven't seen them yet?
