ESPN college basketball analyst Dan Dakich and Iowa head coach Fran McCaffery are not thrilled with each other. The beef started on during Wisconsin’s blowout victory over the Hawkeyes on Tuesday when Iowa big man Adam Woodbury was seen poking Nigel Hayes and Frank Kaminsky in the eyes:
Dakich believed the eye poking was intentional and proceeded to tear into Woodbury:
It’s gutless as well and he’s doing it on purpose. You can say he’s not and you can get mad at me all you want, but he’s doing it on purpose, it needs to stop and the Big Ten office needs to discipline the kid.
Woodbury thinks that that kind of thing is toughness. That’s as cowardly as you can be to hit a guy from behind or to poke a guy in the face and quite frankly Fran McCaffery and his staff have got to stop this.
That’s some pretty significant criticism against a student-athlete from an analyst, especially one that has a long history of coaching like Dakich. As assumed, McCaffery was pissed, issuing the following statement (via The Cedar Rapids Gazette):
There’s absolutely no way Adam Woodbury did that on purpose. Dan Dakich is completely out of line. He crossed the line. He is out of line. He’s not right, it was an accident. Adam Woodbury would never, ever, ever do that.
Then Dakich responded by defending himself before inviting the coach onto his radio show to chat. It appeared that the situation would be over but McCaffery was far from done:
Danny Dakich is so far out of line. He’s just lost it on this one. He doesn’t know Adam Woodbury. And for him to say the reprehensible things he’s said about an amateur is inexcusable. It’s absolutely inexcusable that his network would allow him to say those things of things about a guy he doesn’t know.
He’s a TV guy. If he was a coach, he’d be coaching. I should tell him to go buy some lottery tickets. He’d have a better chance to win the lottery than to ever in any way recommend what I should do with my player or my team.
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