Report: Steve Prohm Says ‘I Don’t Know’ About Job Status
Iowa State head coach Steve Prohm said ‘I don’t know’ when asked about his job status after this season, according to a piece in Sunday’s Des Moines Register.
Prohm just guided the Cyclones to a winless Big 12 season and just two regular-season wins entering next week’s Big 12 Tournament.
The Cyclones finished the season 2-21 overall and 0-for-18 in Big 12 action, making these Cyclones the first ISU team since the 1936-37 team to fail to record a conference win. That team went 3-15 overall and 0-10 in the Big Six Conference.
This also marks the third season in the last four in which the Cyclones won five or fewer Big 12 games. It’s also the first time since 1981 that the Cyclones failed to win at least 10 games (9 wins).
READ MORE: Iowa State Basketball: Candidates to replace Steve Prohm
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After Saturday’s loss to Kansas State, Iowa State seniors Jalen Coleman-Lands and Solomon Young were both asked about Prohm’s job status.
Coleman-Lands, who joined the Cyclones as a senior transfer for this season, said he didn’t feel it was right to judge any coach off of this particular season, according to comments filed at 247Sports.com’s Cyclone Alert.
“Honestly, he’s a great coach,” Coleman-Lands told reporters on Saturday. “I feel like it’s an abnormal year, especially having to adjust around COVID and being in pods and not even having a practice for a few weeks, a month or so before the non-conference season started. So it’s a lot of outliers that come into play. So I don’t think it’s right to judge somebody off this year at all.”
Young, meanwhile, has been with the Cyclones for Prohm’s entire tenure. Also a senior, he’s seen the highs — a 2019 Big 12 Tournament championship — and the lows, that being this season.
Young said it wasn’t for him to say if Prohm deserved another year, but did say that that Prohm “did a great job with what he could control.”
“Well, it’s obviously easy to kick someone while they’re down,” Young said. “I mean people are angry. They will say certain things, but they aren’t the ones on the court and they don’t know what we’re doing. Obviously, wins and losses matter. But the thing that we know as a group is we’re all going through the same thing. Not one of us is going to anything different. And we got to be resilient. We got to just keep going. I mean, [there’s] not much you can do after the fact. He’s got to focus on the next.”
Iowa State will face Oklahoma in the first round of the Big 12 Tournament on Wednesday.
You can find Matthew Postins on Twitter @PostinsPostcard. Send him a tweet with your question to be included in this week’s Big 12 Basketball Mailbag, which appears each Friday during the conference season.
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