Hawkeye Hoops History Versus AP Top 10

Tipping Off an HN Series on Big Iowa Basketball Victories

Photo - Rob Howe/HawkeyeNation.com

Frank Calsbeek and his unstoppable left-handed hook paved the way to a historic victory. The 22-year-old sophomore from Hull scored 32 points as Iowa edged No. 4 Indiana, 65-64, on Jan. 14, 1950 in Iowa Fieldhouse.

A crowd of 12,223 witnessed the Hawkeyes’ first victory over a rated team since the birth of the Associated Press basketball poll on Jan. 17, 1949.

“Iowa can look back on this triumph for years to come and count it as one of the greatest,” wrote Pat Harmon in the Cedar Rapids Gazette. “For it was not scored at expense of an Indiana team which was off form or dead cold at the basket. The Hoosiers were at or near the top of their game. They ran like fiends and passed the ball like sure-handed magicians.” 

Polls are now woven into the fabric of college basketball history. They’re not as important as national titles, Final Fours and conference championships, but they remain another measuring stick of success.

The Indiana triumph in 1950 was one of 70 times a Hawkeye team has defeated a Top 10 opponent in 215 games. Iowa actually gets credit for 72 Top 10 victories. Two of them were losses to Minnesota in 1976-77. The Gophers later forfeited those games. 

The Hawkeyes have a 186-273 overall record against rated foes. The poll started with 20 ranked teams from 1949 to 1960. It dropped to 10 teams until 1969, when it went back to 20. The poll expanded to 25 teams in 1990.

That fluctuation makes it hard to compare coaching eras, because the opportunities to beat a ranked opponent are greater today than they were in the 1960s. But one thing has remained constant - beating a Top 10 team is always a reason to celebrate.

“When we were playing a Top 10 team, a Top Five team, I got more juiced,” said Jess Settles, who was a part of six victories over Top 10 teams during his Iowa career. “A Top 25 team? It just seemed like every other night in the Big Ten, you were playing against somebody like that and it didn’t matter as much.. But Top 10 matchups, those were a big deal.” 

Tom Davis coached his 13 Hawkeye teams to 23 victories over Top 10 opponents between 1986-87 and 1998-99, the most in program history.

That included one memorable nine-day stretch in 1987 when Iowa won at No. 8 Illinois, at No. 6 Purdue and at home over No. 3 Indiana. The Hawkeyes also moved to No. 1 in the poll for the first and only time in program history on Feb. 6, the day of the Purdue game. 

“It was fun,” Davis said of the ascent to No. 1. “At the same time, the pressure’s on.” 

Iowa’s time at No. 1 lasted two games and one week. Ohio State took care of that at Carver-Hawkeye Arena, 80-76, two days after Iowa had defeated Indiana. Davis-coached Hawkeye teams were rated for at least a week in 12 of his 13 seasons as coach, a total of 132 weeks overall. Six of his teams reached the Top 10, and spent a total of 47 weeks there.

Five of his teams spent the entire season ranked - 1986-87, 1987-88, 1988-89, 1992-93 and 1995-96. Iowa was ranked in the Top 10 for the first 35 games it played under Davis. Eleven of his 13 teams beat at least one Top 10 opponent. Of his 23 victories over Top 10 opponents, 14 came at home, five on the road and four at neutral sites.

Under Davis, the Hawkeyes beat teams ranked 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. Davis-coached teams had a 23-30 mark against Top 10 competition. That included an 0-3 mark against No. 1 teams - UNLV in 1987, Duke in 1992 and Indiana in 1993.

Dr Tom’s successor, Steve Alford, started his Iowa career with a victory over No. 1 and defending national champion Connecticut at Madison Square Arena in New York City, 70-68, on Nov. 11, 1999. That is one of three Iowa victories over a No. 1 team in 25 attempts. 

Ralph Miller also beat the nation’s top-ranked team in his first season at Iowa. The Hawkeyes took care of defending national champion UCLA, 87-82, on Jan. 29, 1965 at Chicago Stadium. 

Iowa’s lone victory over a No. 1 team at home came Dec. 29, 2015. Coach Fran McCaffery’s team defeated Michigan State, 83-70.

“I think it’s a statement that you have a quality program, that you’re capable of doing that,” McCaffery said.”We had an unbelievable crowd that night.”

With a sizable contingent of Iowa fans in or headed to Pasadena, Calif., for the Rose Bowl, a home-court advantage appeared in jeopardy.

“Is this place going to be empty, and we’re playing the No. 1 team?” McCaffery remembered thinking. “But there wasn’t a seat to be had.”

Michigan State came in 13-0, but leading scorer and rebounder Denzel Valentine didn’t play because of an injury.

“Everybody was like, “Oh, Valentine didn’t play,” but then we go up there and beat them worse,” McCaffery said of a 76-59 victory in East Lansing 16 days later.

An equally significant big-picture victory under McCaffery came in the final game of his first season (2010-11), a 67-65 decision over No. 6 Purdue at Carver-Hawkeye Arena. “It was really big,” said McCaffery, who was trying to dig the program out of a tough three-season stretch under Todd Lickliter. 

“The student body was really engaged, and we needed that. We had some momentum, and had those two games where we had played really well (overtime losses to Michigan and No. 13 Wisconsin). We were competing. To be able to get over the hump, against the highest-rated team of them all, was really important for us.” 

The victory over the Boilermakers brought some hope for a program that also snapped a 23-game losing streak to rated opponents.

McCaffery teams have gone on to be rated for 68 weeks. His 2013-14, 2015-16 and 2020-21 teams all reached the Top 10, spending a total of 22 weeks there. 

The Purdue victory in 2011 and the Michigan State victory in 2015 are two of seven Top 10 victories under McCaffery. Three of them (two at Ohio State, one at Michigan State) have come on the road. 

McCaffery’s teams have 39 victories overall against Top 25 competition, second only to Davis’s 47. McCaffery’s 2019-20 and 2020-21 teams won a collective 15 games against rated teams, the most of any program in the country.

Alford’s teams also won seven games against Top 10 teams, highlighted by an 83-65 drubbing of No. 2 Missouri in Columbia in 2001.

In between the Alford and McCaffery eras, Lickliter teams went 1-20 against rated foes. That victory, a 43-36 triumph over No. 6 Michigan State in 2008, remains the fewest points ever scored by a Spartan team under Coach Tom Izzo.

Miller coached Iowa to seven Top 10 victories in his six seasons. Only 10 teams were ranked in his first five seasons with the Hawkeyes. He was especially fond of games played at Chicago Stadium. In addition to the victory over No. 1 UCLA, Miller’s teams beat No. 4 Davidson (1969) and No. 7 Cincinnati (1966) in that building.

Miller left for Oregon State after coaching Iowa to an undefeated run (14-0) to the Big Ten title in 1969-70. His successor, Dick Schultz, coached the Hawkeyes for four seasons with just one winning record. 

But Schultz managed five victories over Top 10 teams. In 1972-73, Iowa’s 13 victories included a 65-62 overtime victory over the sixth-ranked Gophers in overtime in Iowa City, and a 79-77 triumph over No. 3 Minnesota in Williams Arena.

Lute Olson reversed Iowa’s fortunes in his nine seasons as coach, including a share of the Big Ten title in 1978-79 and a Final Four run in 1979-80. His five victories over Top 10 teams included a rare sweep of a Bob Knight-coached Indiana team in 1982-83. Iowa beat the second-ranked Hoosiers in Iowa City on Jan. 29, 63-48. Indiana was again No. 2 when Iowa won in Bloomington on Feb. 16, 58-57. The Hoosiers still won the Big Ten title at 13-5. Iowa tied for second, two games back.

Bucky O’Connor, who coached Iowa to the Final Four in 1955 and 1956, had 10 Top 10 victories to his credit. He was especially fond of Illinois. The Hawkeyes beat No. 3 Illinois in 1952, No. 5 Illinois in 1953, No. 7 Illinois in 1955 and No. 2 Illinois in 1956. All four of those games were in Iowa City.

The Calsbeek-inspired upset of No. 4 Indiana in 1950 was the opening act of a unique sweep over the Hoosiers that season. Pops Harrison, who coached that first victory, missed the final 11 Big Ten games that season because of illness. 

O’Connor, the 36-year-old freshman coach, took over. O’Connor’s first career victory over a rated team was at No. 17 Indiana on Feb. 25, 59-53. O’Connor coached two Big Ten title teams, and also had two runner-up finishes, in addition to his back-to-back Final Four runs and a national runner-up finish in 1956.

That success made him the only Iowa coach to enjoy a winning record (23-16) against rated competition.

Over the 1954-55 and 1955-56 seasons, Iowa was rated in 45 of the 52 games it played. The Hawkeyes won 33 of those games.

The 1955-56 team has gone down in history as one of the greatest of all time. All five starters on that “Fabulous Five’ team - No. 21 Carl Cain, No. 22 Bill Seaberg, No. 31 Bill Logan, No. 33 Bill Schoff and No 46 Sharm Scheuerman - had their numbers retired after the season. But things got off to a rocky start that year. Iowa was No. 4 in the first poll of the season, but tumbled out of the Top 20 after a 3-5 start. That included a four-game losing streak, and a humbling 70-45 defeat at California.

But that losing skid was snapped with a 88-73 victory at No. 7 Ohio State. The Hawkeyes ran off 17 consecutive victories, a streak that ended with a 83-71 loss to San Francisco in the national title game.

“We got to the point where we believed we could beat anyone we suited up against,” Cain told the Des Moines Register in 1987. “We got beat in our first Big Ten game at home (against Michigan State), then didn’t lose again until we ran into Bill Russell and that group. We knew we were as good as any team in the country.”

That winning streak remained the program record until the 1986-87 Hawkeyes started the Davis era with 18 consecutive victories.

“Thirty years is long enough,” Cain said, two days before the record was broken. “Anyone who thinks records are forever is daydreaming.”

The 1955-56 Hawkeyes climbed from unranked to No. 5 in the nation during their 17-game winning streak. The 1986-87 Hawkeyes were No. 1 when they won their 18th consecutive game against Indiana. Two days later, Ohio State was celebrating a victory over No. 1.

“When you get rated that high, everyone loads up and tries to make their season by beating you,”Cain said.

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This feature story tips off an upcoming series of pieces remembering Iowa Basketball victories against opponents in the Associated Press Top 10.