This story is part two of a two-part series chronicling the history of Penn’s men’s basketball program. Read part one here. 

On March 10, 2025, Penn men’s basketball announced a familiar move: the program’s head coach was gone.

Seven months ago, former Penn men’s basketball coach Steve Donahue was fired after nine seasons at the helm — a return to square one for a team that had already been there repeatedly within the last two decades. 

The Quakers fired three head coaches between 2009 and 2025: first Glen Miller in 2009, then Jerome Allen in 2015, and Donahue earlier this year.

The turnover reflects the team’s on-court struggles. Since 2007, Penn has won just one Ivy League title, finished with a losing conference record nine times, and defeated rival Princeton just seven times. Allen finished with the lowest win percentage among Penn’s nine coaches from 1966 to 2025 with .386, while Miller won less than 50% of his games.

Fifteen days after Donahue’s exit, the Quakers hired legendary 1982 Wharton graduate Fran McCaffery as the next face of the program. After 15 years at high-major Iowa, McCaffery’s return to Philadelphia has sparked a new air of optimism. In a statement to The Daily Pennsylvanian, 1996 College graduate and Athletics Director Alanna Wren wrote of McCaffery’s prowess as a recruiter and talent developer, noting his penchant for “turning around struggling programs.”

And while a new coach will bring change on many levels, the hurdles facing the team remain the same.

“There have always been challenges,” Craig Littlepage, who coached the Quakers from 1982-85, said. “[It’s been] an uphill fight, not just for the Ivies in general, but the University of Pennsylvania specifically.”

After Penn won its 24th conference crown during Miller’s first season in 2007, the team graduated a wave of key contributors that had been recruited by former coach Fran Dunphy. These included two-time Ivy League Player of the Year Ibrahim Jaaber, as well as leading scorer Mark Zoller and leading shot-blocker Steve Danley.

With Dunphy’s top players out of the picture, the burden of recruitment fell onto Miller. In 2008, the Quakers went 13-18 overall, their first losing season since 2001. In 2009, they went 10-18 overall and 6-8 in conference play, their first losing season in the Ivy League since 1991. In 2010, Miller was fired after Penn began the season 0-7.

Elsewhere in the Ivy League, coach Tommy Amaker took over a last-place Harvard team in 2008 and transformed it into an Ivy champion team just two years later. 

Harvard’s rise to the spotlight came at the heels of a novel need-based financial aid system adopted in 2006, allowing its players to avoid loans even without external scholarships. But its rise was plagued with accusations of Harvard recruiting top basketball talent at the cost of lowering its academic standards.

“I think a lot of [the rise of Harvard] had to do with the change in the financial aid structure and how that worked. And I think schools like Harvard took advantage of that,” Ugonna Onyekwe, who played for the Quakers from 1999-2003, said. “NIL has probably made it harder for teams like Penn or Ivy League teams to compete. … We were just a lot more talented than pretty much all other teams in the League at the time.”

“The Ivy League holds Penn back,” Alan Cotler, who played for Penn from 1970-72, said. “Penn is uniquely situated to be the Stanford of the East Coast. The other [Ivy League] schools are not. Because of Philly, the facilities, the exposure.”

Left in the lurch from Miller’s early departure, the Quakers turned to Allen as interim coach. A legendary player for the Quakers, Allen starred for Penn from 1992-95 and contributed to Penn’s record 48-game Ivy League winning streak. He graduated as the program’s all-time leader in both assists and steals. At the end of the 2009-10 campaign, Penn promoted Allen to a permanent position.

What followed was a tenure marred by both failure and controversy. After a 20-win campaign in 2012, Allen led Penn to three straight seasons of nine wins or less before being fired in 2015. Allen ended his tenure as the first program coach to not win a conference title since 1956. 

Three years later, Allen testified to receiving over $300,000 in bribes from businessman Philip Esformes in exchange for helping Esformes’ son gain admission to Penn. The program was subsequently placed on two years of probation, while Allen himself received a 15-year show-cause penalty.

In the wake of Allen’s departure, Penn turned to a familiar face: Donahue, who had served as an assistant coach on Dunphy’s staff from 1990-2000. A noted tactician and Ivy League winner, Donahue had previously led Cornell to three straight Ancient Eight titles including a run to the Sweet Sixteen. In an evolving sport, Donahue’s three-point heavy attack seemed primed to relaunch Penn as a perennial power.

In the early going, it did just that. Donahue led the Quakers to an Ivy title in his third season, compiling a 12-2 conference clip behind a balanced attack. That 2017-18 season, Penn finished second in the conference in both points per game and points per game allowed and logged two sophomores, AJ Brodeur and Ryan Betley, in the conference’s top 10 scorers.

The 2017-18 season marked Donahue’s final 20-win season. In the years that followed, the Quakers slowly regressed thanks to a number of factors, namely their inability to recruit and retain top talent. In 2022, Donahue secured a class of just two freshman signees.

“Donahue’s staff did not do a good job of personally recruiting,” Cotler said. 

Further, as the prevalence of the transfer portal rose steadily in college sports, Penn became a frequent victim of transfer losses. 

In the spring of 2023, Ivy League Player of the Year Jordan Dingle transferred to St. John’s. Then, the following season, then-freshman Tyler Perkins left for crosstown rival Villanova after breaking the Penn program record for first-year scoring.

“Everyone wants to play and compete at the highest level, to prove that they belong, to prove that they’re one of the best. And so, if someone has that opportunity, and … make some money doing it, it’s almost a no-brainer,” Onyekwe said. 

“[Before], there were only two options, either you were going to stay at Penn and be a student, or stay at Penn and play basketball and be a student,” Jed Ryan, who played for Penn from 1996-99, said. “There was no other option. And really that was because, [when] you came to the University, you came for the education.”

In a statement to the DP, Wren wrote that Penn losing talent to Power Four schools was “nothing new,” adding that the school would need to do a better job of “showcasing and celebrating the Penn experience,” which includes postgraduate job opportunities.

But Penn’s new staff has also produced new methods to counteract the University’s inherent recruiting disadvantages. On Nov. 6, McCaffery said that the program was utilizing alumni donations to fund “true NIL opportunities and paid internships,” for student-athletes — a first-of-its-kind measure in the Ivy League.

That endeavor is one of several ways McCaffery has turned Penn’s program upside down.

“I think it’s the intensity from our team,” star senior guard/forward Ethan Roberts said when asked about the biggest change under McCaffery’s leadership. “Practices feel so much more real, and the energy’s just different. The biggest change has been the hope that Fran’s given us, and how he’s poured into us already.”

“Former players and former coaches have rallied behind Fran McCaffery at this very important time for Penn basketball,” Littlepage, who gave McCaffery his first collegiate coaching job in 1982, said. “I am just delighted to see the number of former players who are connecting as a result of Fran being back … I think all that speaks to what a great choice it has been for the University.”

Penn is off to a 6-4 start this season, including its first win over Saint Joseph’s since 2019 and a second-place finish in the Big 5 Classic. 

McCaffery has wasted no time on the recruiting trail, securing commitments from three-star recruits Ethan Lin and Isaiah Carroll. The latter was the highest-rated recruit this decade for Penn men’s basketball, according to 247 Sports. 

In many ways, Penn’s new coach is positioned to restore a once-great program the way only a member of its glory days could.

“It’s so important to me, because I grew up in Philadelphia. And I sat right here every Saturday for many, many years, hoping that one day I’d get to play here,” McCaffery said. “Which I did. I coached here for one year a long time ago. And I’m so thrilled to be back here, helping continue what is one of the great traditions in college basketball.” 

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