Quakeaways on Fran McCaffery becoming Penn men’s basketball’s new head coach

Penn men’s basketball made it official on Thursday, revealing that the school has hired Class of 1982 alum Fran McCaffery as its head coach.

At first glance, the deal looks like a win-win for both sides. The Quakers get a proven high-major winner and one of the best offensive coaches in the country to revitalize the program and the alumni base. For the 65-year-old McCaffery, the homecoming job is a soft landing after a 15-season run at Iowa. McCaffery can recruit and scheme what will presumably be his last collegiate coaching job without the pressure-cooker environment inherent to power conference basketball these days.

There will be much ink to spill about McCaffery in the coming days and weeks, but in the short term, here are a few thoughts about the hire I’ve jotted down:

There are existing pieces on the roster McCaffery can coach up immediately.

It sure looks like Penn will retain at least two of its three core pieces. Freshman point guard AJ Levine entered the transfer portal on Tuesday, then withdrew roughly 24 hours after once major media outlets reported McCaffery was going to be the choice.

Meanwhile, leading scorer Ethan Roberts has publicly praised the McCaffery hiring decision, telling the Philadelphia Inquirer he’s ‘super excited for our future.’ I spent the last month of the regular season mentally making peace with the assumption that Roberts was going to transfer, but the junior wing sounds like he’s all-in on the idea of sticking around and playing under McCaffery.

Roberts’ size, length and shooting ability makes him the perfect type of floor-spacer for McCaffery’s uptempo, free-flowing offense. Levine has room to grow offensively, but his defensive aggression and athleticism are plus tools.

The big immediate question for McCaffery is whether he’ll be able to keep sophomore guard Sam Brown, who entered the transfer portal on Monday but made it clear a return to Penn is very much on the table. Brown was the only underclassman to make either All-Ivy team. Re-recruiting the elite shooter has to be McCaffery’s first priority.

McCaffery needs to aggressively attack the transfer portal to build the frontcourt.

The other Penn player to enter the transfer portal this week was freshman big man Michelangelo Oberti, who yo-yoed up and down the rotation throughout the season.

With all due respect to the players on the current roster, there’s no one Penn currently has who resembles Luka Garza, the do-it-all big man McCaffery coached at Iowa to national player of the year honors and the NBA.

In a dream scenario, McCaffery would get one of his former Iowa players or commits to follow him. The two candidates who immediately spring to mind are 6-foot-8 class of 2025 recruit Dezmon Briscoe — who decommitted after McCaffery’s firing — and Ladji Dembele, a 6-foot-8 sophomore who shot 38.2% from three this season and had a KenPom offensive efficiency rating of 114.3 points per possession.

The name I would not get my hopes up for is McCaffery’s youngest son, Jack McCaffery. The four-star recruit has committed to play at Butler, where his brother, Connor, is an assistant. If Connor chose to follow his father to Penn, though, then that calculus would change.

The McCaffery hire shows the athletic department is serious about winning.

McCaffery’s hire is the biggest splash hire the Ivy League has seen since Harvard brought Tommy Amaker aboard in 2007. His reputation speaks for itself: NCAA Tournament appearances with four different schools, plus six victories in the tournament itself.

Power-conference fans mocked McCaffery while he was at Iowa for failing to advance to the Sweet 16. That, frankly, sounds like a champagne problem. Penn hasn’t won an NCAA Tournament game since 1994 and has made the Big Dance once since 2007, when McCaffery was still at Siena.

There was no other candidate on the market with the credentials McCaffery possessed who was a serious option for Penn. I was explicit early on in this search that I preferred Dave Klatsky from NYU as a potential program-builder, but once it became obvious that McCaffery was a serious option, I embraced the idea of bringing him on board.

McCaffery was the best candidate on the market to deliver immediate results.