As Iowa women's basketball head coach Lisa Bluder rides off into the sunset after 40 years as a head coach — and longtime assistant coach Jan Jensen steps into the new role as the program's sixth head coach — the future of Iowa women's basketball seems at once less predictable and as secure as ever.

Bluder, 63, had been in charge of the program for 24 years, leading the Hawkeyes to consecutive appearances in the national championship game in 2023 and 2024 — the only such appearances in program history, and only the second and third times Iowa had ever made the Final Four (the other came in 1993, under legendary coach C. Vivian Stringer).

Jensen had been an assistant for Bluder for 32 years, dating back to Bluder's Drake career (where she had previously coached Jensen as a player), and was the associate head coach for the last 20 seasons.

First and foremost, Jan Jensen is the permanent head coach, with no interim tag. We asked the UI about the head coaching job not being publicly posted for two weeks, as is generally required, and the university responded Tuesday morning (edited lightly for brevity):

"The Athletics Department requested and received approval for a waiver from the standard recruitment and job posting process to hire Jan Jensen [as head coach]. With appropriate justification, a waiver of the search process may be granted upon review and approval by the University Human Resources Compensation and Classification unit and the University Office of Institutional Equity."

Being that Jensen was already a 24-year University of Iowa employee and had spent the last 20 as an associate head coach, it would not be difficult to put together a rationale for bypassing the public posting. There is simply not another candidate more qualified to succeed Bluder as Iowa's head coach.

As such, kudos must be given to athletic director Beth Goetz for ensuring this transition went as quickly and smoothly as possible. It's easy to say the succession plan fell into Goetz's lap, but "not overthinking it" is a rarer skill than is typically credited. They won't all be this easy, of course, but a less competent athletic director could have easily made this situation more difficult as well.

Jensen's quick installation as the next head coach should send a strong message to incumbent players, incoming recruits, and prospects alike that there will not be a sea change in the direction or culture of the Iowa women's program.

Nonetheless, NCAA rules dictate that the Transfer Portal will be open for 30 days for the Iowa players and signees affected by the coaching change, so that will be an open issue until it's, well, not.

And yet: this is a conversation every player had with Jensen and the staff after the season ended in April, so it's hard to imagine many — if any — roster moves that wouldn't have already happened in the standard window. As such, as of Tuesday morning, no players have announced their entry into the Transfer Portal or requested a release from their National Letter of Intent, and no recruits have decommitted from Iowa.

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Jan Jensen has a deeper resume than practically any first-time head coach could hope for, in this or any sport. She served alongside Bluder for the last 32 seasons, and got an incredible tutelage in building and maintaining a program with high standards on and off the court. That includes managing superstars like Caitlin Clark, who didn't just shatter the mold of what a college athlete could be but set a brand-new one — one that includes external commitments and the outside attention (positive and otherwise) that comes with them.

Still, Jensen was not only invaluable to the program from a basketball standpoint, but invaluable to Bluder as a lieutenant and confidant, and that system helped sustain Hawkeye basketball into this new era of brighter lights and higher expectations. Who will be Jensen's outlet inside the program when the non-basketball aspects of the job start weighing on her? Who's the staffer that will provide the laser focus on mechanics when Jensen's overseeing the practices as a whole?

Simply put: who's going to be Jan Jensen's Jan Jensen?

The future of Iowa's coaching staff should become clearer over the next few days, and we expect to ask Jensen about staff retention at her press conference Wednesday afternoon.

That all said, Iowa basketball under Lisa Bluder wasn't just a consistent winner, it was a consistent vibe. Bluder cultivated an incredible program atmosphere of inclusion and good vibes, and if anything Jensen embodied that culture with even less abandon than her more staid head coach. She's friendly. She's fun. She connects with players on a genuine and personal level, to an extent that basketball seems almost secondary.

Almost.

Jensen can coach the hell out of the sport too, as evidenced by All-American performances by unheralded recruits Megan Gustafson and Monika Czinano in the post, as well as harnessing a level of energy and talent in Caitlin Clark that usually only comes from splitting uranium atoms. Oppenheimer in an immaculate pantsuit.

There's an absolute barrage of elite talent coming from the Midwest in 2024 and beyond, and Jensen can give prospects like the 2026 trio of Maddyn Greenway, Jenica Lewis and Addison Bjorn a commitment to stick around in Iowa City for the duration of their college careers, a timeline that would have had Bluder pushing 70 years old. At 55 herself, Jensen is hardly a mewling kitten, but by 2031 (a five-year window for the Class of '26 prospects to exhaust their eligibility) she'll still be younger then than Bluder is today.

There's no such thing as guaranteed success in basketball or life — the layups still have to go in, the wins still have to be earned, and luck still has to smile on the teams with championship aspirations. That'll never change, regardless of who's stalking the sidelines in Iowa City.

The best thing a coach can do, then, is set up their players for that success as best as possible — and Jensen is as prepared as anybody in the world to do that for the Hawkeyes.