In Return To Penn, McCaffery Honors Legacy of Fran Dunphy

“As a basketball aficionado, as much as I can call myself that, it was just fun to watch,” Dunphy said. “You like to see people do well.”

When Dunphy was coaching in the ‘90s, the Quakers made frequent appearances in the top 25, trading Ivy League titles with Princeton and, in 1994, becoming the first Ivy team to win an NCAA Tournament game since 1983. It was another distinguished chapter in the history of a proud program that held its own for decades in the Big 5 and went to the Final Four in 1979.

Dunphy eventually left for Temple, and the tournament appearances that had become almost a given became few and far between. The rest of the Ivy League — Harvard and Yale in particular — invested heavily in men’s basketball and closed the gap with Penn and Princeton. A few misguided coaching hires — Glen Miller from Brown, who never understood the program; legendary alum Jerome Allen from that coaching staff, who understood it well but was caught in an admissions scandal — saw Penn fall badly off the pace. Former Dunphy assistant Steve Donahue, who led Cornell to the Sweet Sixteen in 2010, could muster only one NCAA appearance in 2018 before things fizzled to an 8-19 nadir last season.

Then McCaffery came home.

At 66, his own tenure at Iowa having stuttered to a close, McCaffery might have seemed an odd choice from the outside. But he is a native, homegrown, one of the best high-school players of his generation, and finished his basketball career at Penn after starting at Wake Forest. His father was a cop who worked security at the Palestra; for his parents, date night was a Saturday Big 5 doubleheader. He grew up with this. And while his coaching journey took him away — to Lehigh, to UNC Greensboro, to Siena, to Iowa — it finally brought him all the way back to where it started.

McCaffery brought in T.J. Power, a former top-50 recruit who had failed to make an impact at Duke or Virginia, and Donahue left behind some talent: most notably Army transfer Ethan Roberts, a high-scoring guard. McCaffery made the most of it. 

“I’ve coached a number of different programs and been fortunate enough to have success because I had really good players that wanted to win, prioritize winning, and from the minute I got to University of Pennsylvania, that’s what these guys did,” McCaffery said. “They truly love each other. It sounds cliche-ish, but when you have a big roster like we do, typically not everybody’s happy, and these guys are. They support one another in practice, on the bench, on the road, and they’re ready to step up if somebody gets hurt, somebody gets sick, and that’s what you have to have.”

After starting 2-4 in the league, narrow late-season wins over Princeton and Harvard put the Quakers into the four-team Ivy Tournament where they conjured magic even without the injured Roberts: An overtime win over Harvard followed by a stunning overtime triumph over Yale, with an unstoppable Power scoring 44 points, including two 3-pointers in the final seven seconds of regulation to force OT, to go with 14 rebounds.

Power’s performance against Yale ranks among the great postseason games in Penn history, and it came at the end of a season when Power’s role on the team grew and grew. He started out deferring to his teammates as a playmaker; by the end, he was making the biggest plays himself.

“As the season wore on, especially the last half of the Ivy season, when it came time to say, ‘OK we need our alpha to be our alpha,’ he stepped into it,” said Vince Curran, a former player and current broadcaster whose family’s name graces the coaches’ offices. “You saw lots of glimpses of it early and when Ethan Roberts got banged up, it forced T.J. to be a more forceful offensive player. As he continued to do that, as he continued to be more and more aggressive, the results spoke for themselves. He was awesome.”

And by March, he’d brought the program all the way back to where its alumni and former players alike firmly believe it belongs.

“I do feel like something happened in the Palestra this year,” said Adam Sherr, a longtime university administrator, assistant band director and alum who has spent most of his life at Penn and a good chunk of that inside the Palestra. “They were 12-2 at home, and it wasn’t because there were huge crowds. The Penn students these days don’t really turn out the way they did when I was a student. In some ways you can’t blame them because the product hasn’t been as good as it was. This year the product was so good, so I’m hoping more people will come out. But this year, it did feel like they had energy in the Palestra they didn’t have in the past.”

And now the Quakers, back in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since Donahue’s only appearance in 2018, face an opponent that is all too familiar to McCaffery. After all their years doing battle in the Big Ten, there are no secrets between McCaffery and Brad Underwood, who renewed acquaintances in January when Illinois played Penn State at the Palestra. “I told our staff, this is pure joy,” Underwood said. “This is what I saw when I saw Fran. I saw the smile, he was happy. He told us exactly where he sat when he was a kid watching games in The Palestra, got to play there. Then you come full circle and you come back to your alma mater, I can’t imagine there’s maybe anybody in college basketball any more proud than Fran McCaffery is.

“To be able to live out something like that is really pretty cool. It doesn’t get to happen very often, but he was so happy. In this profession that’s really hard to do. What he’s done with that team is just short of amazing. They’re good. It’s a good basketball team. I see Fran’s thumbprint all over it and the competitiveness. I don’t think I expected anything else.”

The joy in McCaffery’s season was apparent to anyone who watched him at Iowa. That famous red face, steam coming from his ears, rarely made an appearance. His team got better and better as the season went on. And even when Penn botched a chance at a game-winning shot late against Yale, his demeanor never changed. Power took care of the rest.

“I think he came in with a plan and a goal that he instilled in all of us,” senior guard A.J. Levine said. “To see it coming to fruition is just unbelievable. I think the biggest thing with him is just how clear he is with us and how direct, like we all know what we need and what he wants out of us. Throughout the year we’ve all improved and gotten better and gotten to March Madness because of that. So much credit to Fran for us being here right now.”

Now that the Quakers have returned to the postseason, the next task is making this success sustainable. 

The Ivy League did not opt into the House settlement and severely restricts NIL deals, but the new coaching staff brought a commitment to work whatever angles it could to upgrade the talent level, with McCaffery pitching alums on paid internships for his players.

Next year’s recruiting class is ranked 80th nationally by 24/7, second in the Ivy League, and there’s one potential transfer who the staff doesn’t need to scout: Jack McCaffery, a 6-foot-9 forward and the coach’s youngest son, is reportedly entering the portal after playing his freshman year at Butler. He was a top-100 prospect in the class of 2025.

“This feels great, the direction the program is heading in right now,” Curran said. “We also have to make sure that we acknowledge how hard this is, what Fran was able to accomplish in Year 1. We have to put in place the institutional measures and tools to succeed … It’s not going to be dropping a bag of cash on a recruit’s doorstep to come to play for us. But what Penn can offer for the rest of someone’s life is worth way more. If we position it and sell it properly, we’re going to get the right types of kids to look past the short-term chocolate in exchange for the long-term filet.”

For now, Penn faces a difficult task against Illinois, a far bigger team than the Quakers. Roberts remains out with a concussion. Power fell ill and flew south separately from the team, which took a charter flight for the first time this season. But this has been an improbable campaign, one that woke up the echoes in the Palestra and brought basketball joy back to a campus that used to thrive on it. McCaffery’s already done the impossible once this season. Why not twice?

“It’s so fragile, what it is that we do,” Dunphy said. “Seasons can change on a game and games can change on a play, hence seasons can change on a play. It’s just crazy the world that we live in. I don’t know how I kept my sanity. It’s amazing. This was fun to watch. Fran has a way about him that I think will be ingratiating to the kids. He will hold them accountable but give them some freedom. That’s where we’re all trying to get to.”