With apologies to Thomas Wolfe, it appears you can go home again… even if it takes 42 years.
Former Iowa men’s basketball coach and 1982 Penn alum Fran McCaffery was named Penn’s new coach in a Penn Athletics announcement Thursday.
The hire will be a homecoming for McCaffery, who grew up in Northwest Philadelphia, attended La Salle College High School and played for the Quakers from 1979 to 1982.
“I am thrilled to bring Fran back to Penn and Philadelphia as our next head men’s basketball coach,” Penn director of athletics Alanna Wren said in the press release. “Fran has had success at every level of Division I and is passionate about restoring our program to glory. 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.”
Wren, aided by the Parker Executive Search firm, had a number of candidates from the Penn family to consider, including NYU head coach Dave Klatsky, Colgate head coach Matt Langel, Robert Morris head coach Andy Toole, Christopher Newport head coach John Krikorian and Auburn assistant coach Ira Bowman, as well as several successful Ivy League assistants at Princeton (Brett MacConnell) and Yale (Matt Kingsley, Justin Simon).
Ultimately, Wren chose the person with the longest resume.
As a teen playing on the courts of the Samuel Pennypacker School and the Sonny Hill League, McCaffery’s prowess on the court earned him the affectionate nickname “White Magic” by Philadelphia Bulletin sportswriter Julius Thompson.
“I grew up in the city and I grew up in a predominately Black neighborhood playing in schoolyards with nothing but Black kids, and I had a game that reflected the city,” McCaffery told HawkeyeNation.com after he was named to the Big Ten’s Anti-Hate and Anti-Racism Coalition in 2020. “And it was a city game. As opposed to a kid who grew up shooting in his own backyard. To be truthful, that’s the reason I never developed a great jump shot. The two baskets we played on across the street (at Pennypacker School) didn’t have any nets. So, we were taking everything to the hole.”
McCaffery took his talents to Wake Forest in the fall of 1977, starting 11 games at the point and helping the Demon Deacons to a 19-10 record.
After transferring back home to play for Penn and sitting out the obligatory year, which turned out to be the Quakers’ Final Four 1978-79 season, McCaffery was a key player for Bob Weinhauer’s teams that won Ivy League championships in 1980 and 1982.
In his senior year, the Philadelphia native was the Ancient Eight’s leaders in steals and assists, as well as the team’s Most Inspirational Player.
Following his graduation from Wharton, McCaffery remained in West Philly as an assistant varsity coach and head sub-varsity coach for new Quakers head coach Craig Littlepage.
The next season, he moved to Lehigh to be an assistant coach and recruiting coordinator for Tom Schneider.
When Schneider was hired to take over Penn’s program in 1985, McCaffery moved up to the big chair at the age of 26, making him the then-youngest Division I head coach in the nation.
In his third year at the helm, Lehigh went 21-10 and won the East Coast Conference tournament, where the No. 16 Engineers lost to No. 1 Temple 87-73 in the opening round.
From there, McCaffery spent the next 11 seasons as an assistant coach and recruiting coordinator at Notre Dame, initially for former Penn assistant coach Digger Phelps and later for John MacLeod.
McCaffery returned to the head coaching chair in 1999, when he moved to UNC Greensboro.
In his six seasons with the Spartans, McCaffery had a record of 90-87 with appearances in the 2001 NCAA Tournament and the 2002 NIT.
From there, McCaffery moved to Siena for six years, where his teams had 20-win campaigns in his last four seasons, in addition to three straight MAAC championships and NCAA appearances from 2008 to 2010. In the 2008 and 2009 tournaments, his Saints recorded opening-round upsets of Vanderbilt and Ohio State.
With Glenn Miller dismissed from Penn seven games into the 2009-10 season and replaced by interim head coach Jerome Allen, rumors circulated in the Penn community that McCaffery was interested in coming back to his alma mater.
While the Red and Blue faithful may never find out what truly transpired during that search process, the Quakers opted to give the permanent job to Allen, who was let go at the end of the 2014-15 season and later found to have accepted over $300,000 in bribes to recruit a player for the 2015-16 team.
Instead of patrolling the Palestra hardwood, McCaffery headed back to the Midwest to take over for Todd Lickliter at Iowa.
McCaffery took over a program that had won less than 40% of its games, including less than 28% of its Big Ten matchups, and badly in need of a rebuild.
Over the next 15 seasons, McCaffery restored Iowa’s pride, finishing with a winning percentage of 59% overall and 50% in the Big Ten, one of the nation’s toughest conferences. His decade-and-a-half service in Iowa City and 297 victories are both tops for a program that has been led by legendary figures, including Lute Olsen, George Raveling and Tom Davis.
In addition to his Iowa teams getting selected to the NCAA Tournament seven times and the NIT on four occasions, McCaffery recruited and coached four All-Americans (Luka Garza, Keegan Murray, Kris Murray, Jarrod Utoff), as well as one honorable mention All-American (Peter Jok, brother of former 2014 Penn hoops alum Dau Jok) over the last decade.
Through his 29 years as a head coach, McCaffery has an overall record of 548-384 and is one of only five coaches (Rick Pitino, Bob Huggins, Eddie Sutton and Lefty Driesell are the others) to win conference tournament titles in four or more different leagues and is one of just 14 Division I head coaches to take at least four different programs to the NCAA Tournament.
McCaffery will use his decades of experiences, as well as his history at Penn, to rebuild a program that has fallen to the lower ranks of the Ancient Eight.
“I am excited and honored to return to my alma mater and the city of Philadelphia to lead the Penn men’s basketball program,” McCaffery told Penn Athletics. “It is a program that I have fond memories of from my previous time there as a student-athlete and assistant coach. My vision is to return Penn to prominence in the Ivy League and beyond and bring an exciting style of play to The Palestra.”
The Quakers finished last season at 12-15 overall and 4-10 in Ivy play, which left the team in seventh place for the second straight year.
While the Red and Blue was in the hunt for an Ivy League regular season title as recently as the 2023 season, Penn has only two regular season championships (2007, 2018) since Fran Dunphy’s 10 first-place teams from 1993 through 2006.
In the new landscape of college basketball, where the transfer portal and NIL money have huge influence, the Quakers lost top players Jordan Dingle to St. John’s and Tyler Perkins to Villanova in the last several years. Already this off-season, second team All-Ivy guard Sam Brown and first-year guard AJ Levine have entered the portal and explored their options, though Levine said he will return next year after reports emerged McCaffery was coming to Penn.
Hopefully for Penn basketball and its fans, McCaffery can keep these two on board, as well as junior guard/forward Ethan Roberts, improve recruiting which has fallen off over the last several years, and get the defensive metrics back to the numbers not seen since the Dunphy era so more banners can be hung at the Palestra.