T1B

Alford is the cancer who was responsible for Iowa's demise in basketball

I would say Bowlsby is at fault for this. He had a chance to fire the guy about 3 years before he did before the program went completely in the shitter. He didn't, so the program fell apart. Bowlsby could have prevented this by doing his job. Alford was merely cashing a paycheck. Can't blame him.

No doubt Alford is a tool. His character leaves a lot to be desired. I've heard plenty of stories about him being cheap and thinking he deserved to get everything he wanted in Iowa City for free and I know he left poor tips because he used to come into the restaurant I worked at back in college. I never waited on him, but I was told by multiple co-workers that he would leave just a buck or 2 for his entire family. Lame.

The Pierre Pierce incidents really hurt this program. Steve refuses to admit to this. He wants to blame Iowa and everyone else but himself for his struggles at Iowa but the fact is the problem wasn't the negative message boards, the lack of a practice facility, or the fans..........the problem was him. He simply could not prepare his team to face shitty teams like Northwestern. How can you blame the program for losing to fucking Northwestern over and over again? There was a year or 2 where had we just been able to frickin' beat them we would have gone dancing.

He could not recruit after the first Pierre Pierce incident. Coaches were recruiting against his integrity too much and were telling recruits "do you really wanna play with a rapist?". The way Alford handled that was a joke and embarrassed the University of Iowa. The whole country was shaking their heads at us.

Steve would have done fine if he could just get his team ready to play shit opponents and didn't handle the Pierre Pierce situation the way he did. Those were his 2 main problems. He also did a poor job of getting role players involved. In 2001-2002 we were a preseason national title contender that ended up in the NIT because Alford had no idea how to use his role players like Duez Henderson, Pierre Pierce, Brody Boyd, and Jared Reiner. He just let Recker and Evans do what they wanted. I suppose this is the fans fault, right???? Not so much, Steve!

His teams almost never had good team chemistry until the end. 2005-2006 they had great chemistry but most of those kids were friends growing up. Horner, Brunner, Haluska, Henderson...........those guys have been playing together since they were kids. That had little to do with Alford's coaching.

I'm fairly certain I know why Alfraud couldn't create any team chemistry and it comes from a quote by Duez Henderson I heard on the radio about a year ago. He said (paraphrasing) "It seemed like Recker was always over at Steve's house, but I couldn't even tell you where he lived. Neither could anyone else on the team". That tells me all I needed to know.