What Iowa's looking like after Caitlin Clark (and Lisa Bluder)
Post whisperer Jan Jensen is doing her thing, but so is Lucy Olsen
The college basketball offseason is a long time with a lot of news. Some of it is meaningful; some of it is very much worthless. It’s easy for some things to get lost, then. Obviously, I think the average person is aware that Caitlin Clark no longer plays college basketball for the Iowa Hawkeyes. She now plays professionally for the Indiana Fever and has become quite good at doing her job:
What you may not remember as well is the other major piece of Iowa news from the offseason, which happened in mid-May.
Lisa Bluder, who had been Iowa’s head coach for 24 years, elected to retire after back-to-back national title game appearances. Can you blame her? Life after Caitlin Clark, Kate Martin, and others would’ve been tough, and Bluder (age 63) is at the age when many coaches begin wondering if this new era of hoops is fully worth it. But: next to Bluder for the 24 years prior was Jan Jensen. Jensen, known as Iowa’s post whisperer, was a natural pick to follow Bluder, her former college coach.
Essentially, no matter if Iowa was good, bad, or in-between this year, they were going to be inherently interesting to watch play basketball. Few teams get to go through such a massive sea change in a single offseason. The only program in recent memory that is something near it would be Wisconsin losing Frank Kaminsky and Bo Ryan, but Ryan hung onto the job for a month into the next season before retiring out of nowhere. This was both at once, which is a serious shock to the system.
The good news for Iowa faithful, and for any fan of watchable basketball, is that Iowa looks like a pretty good basketball team. An easy dispatching of a middling Northern Illinois team (91-73) and a surprise beatdown of a Tournament-ish Virginia Tech side (71-52) have fans feeling reasonably well heading into an interesting week for the program. Tonight, they’ll play Toledo, a top-3 team in the MAC, then draw a true road game against Drake on Sunday. By the end of the week, we’ll know a good bit about just how real this is.
For now, the two games we have to go off of are displaying some pretty interesting information about what Jan Jensen wants her Iowa to be, and what Iowa wants to be after Caitlin Clark. Spoiler: it looks a lot like Iowa before Caitlin Clark.
Unsurprisingly, the ‘post whisperer’ wants to feed the post like old times
If you’ve just tuned in for the last four years, maybe you think Iowa is this place that generates all-time amazing guards. Alternately, if you somehow managed to tune in just for 2020-2024 and 2012-2015, you may have made this mistake. Before Clark was Samantha Logic, a tremendous point guard that got third-team All-American in 2015 and was a WNBA first-round draft pick. Even right before Clark, right before the world shut down, there was the fabulous Kathleen Doyle, also a third-team All-American and one-time Indiana Fever player.
A more fun thing to do is to look at Iowa’s single-season Win Shares leaders, though, and put in yellow highlighter which ones were centers. I have some news for you.
The backbone of Iowa’s program, for most of the last 24 years, was built on excellent post play. This lineage goes back a long, long way: Randi Peterson, Jamie Cavey, Morgan Johnson, Bethany Doolittle, and more recently to the names you now know of Megan Gustafson and Monika Czinano. The fun part about post whisperer Jensen is seeing the lineage play out on the court. Here’s Gustafson in spring 2018 on a common post pin Iowa has run for most of my adult lifetime:
Here is Hannah Stuelke in March 2024 running much the same thing.
Unlike modern Iowa, though, older pre-Caitlin Iowa teams rarely took many threes and focused more on post-up bully-ball to beat their opponents. The Caitlin era forced more of a perimeter-focused approach that saw Iowa go from a normal part of the crowd 3PA-wise to one of the sport’s foremost frontrunners on deep balls.
Marrying the old with the new will take time, but you can see how Jensen wants to utilize this more perimeter-heavy approach while also accepting that two of her three or four best offensive pieces are classic bigs that can dominate down low.