By Pat Harty

IOWA CITY, Iowa – Ben McCollum will experience another first as the new Iowa men’s basketball coach when his team faces Maryland on Saturday at Carver-Hawkeye Arena.

It will be McCollum’s first Big Ten home game as the head Hawk, and his hope is that it goes much better than his Big Ten debut, which saw Iowa fall to Michigan State 71-52 this past Tuesday at the Breslin Center in East Lansing, Michigan.

McCollum met with the media on Friday and was asked right away how his players have responded to the lopsided defeat.

“At practice they’ve done a good job,” McCollum said. “But I think sometimes, though, these are tricky situations where it’s not acceptable. And again, I’m probably more process focused, but there’s also a competitor in there that says it’s not okay to lose.

“You’ve got to visit that part of it and fix it. But yet, you can’t let it have an earth shattering effect like this is the end of the world. It’s kind of like you’ve got to find that balance between the two. And hopefully, we’ve found it. But we’ll find out Saturday.”

The loss at Michigan Sate marked just the fifth time that a McCollum-coached team has lost since he returned to his home state to coach in 2024.

The Storm lake native led Drake to a 31-4 record in his only season as head coach last season, while the Hawkeyes are 7-1 heading into Saturday’s game.

And then prior to that, McCollum led Northwest Missouri State to four Division II national titles over 14 seasons, including a 38-0 record in the 2018-19 season and a 35-1 record in the 2016-17 season.

In his final eight seasons at Northwest Missouri State, his teams combined to lost just 21 games.

However, in his first two seasons at Northwest Missouri State, his teams combined to lose 31 games, finishing 12-15 and 10-16, respectively.

“So we’ve been there,” McCollum said. “We know what it takes to be able to get a program, over the top. We’ve had experience with it. It’s not always going to be a perfect transition, especially the way we want to do it.

“So I don’t think having experience losing allows you to handle losing better, meaning I don’t think losing is every fun. We’re still fighting and we’re still in an upward trend. But, sometimes, it goes like this in the trend.”

Maryland, meanwhile, is in a similar situation as Iowa with a new head coach and with a roster that has been rebuilt almost from the ground up following the hiring of Buzz Williams as head coach.

The Terps will bring a 6-3 record into Iowa City following an 89-63 victory over Wagner on Tuesday in College Park, Maryland. This will also be Maryland’s first Big Ten game.

Maryland’s three losses have come against Georgetown, Gonzaga and Alabama. The Terps are 1-0 in true road games, winning 89-82 at Marquette on Nov. 15.

The Terrapins have four players averaging in double figures and seven averaging at least 8.4 points this season.

Pharrel Payne, who started his career at Minnesota, leads the team with 18.9 points, 6.8 rebounds and eight blocks, while shooting 64.4 percent from the field.

Darius Adams (13.8), David Coit (13.2) and Solomon Washington (10.0) are also averaging in double figures.

“They’re another good offensive rebounding team, historically,” McCollum said. “They do play pretty fast. I don’t know how fast their possessions are this year. I haven’t checked that. But historically they’ve played fast, a multi-defense team.

“And then, obviously, they’ve got a really good big guy in Pharrel Payne, who’s elite.”

Senior point guard Bennett Stirtz was the only player for Iowa to score more than seven points in the loss at Michigan State as he finished with 14, which is four below his per-game average.

McCollum is faced with trying to develop more reliable scoring options to complement Stirtz.

But it’s a process, and sometimes, a slow process.

“It’s difficult to leverage the defense if you don’t have multiple,” McCollum said of scoring options. “It’s also difficult to leverage a defense if your screener is not as big a threat as you need him to be. And so we’re trying to figure out exactly how we’re going to do that. Where is that secondary leverage, the third leverage? How can you make the defense afraid of you to create rotations. And we haven’t totally found that yet, but we’re searching. We’ve got some solutions, whether or not they work in the game, we’ll find out here on Saturday.”

It would help if 6-foot-10 junior forward Alvaro Folgueiras, who transferred from Robert Morris, could stay out of foul trouble, which he has struggled with lately, including against Michigan State.

“He’s just got to kind of get into the flow with the offense, and then defensively, make sure that he’s there,” McCollum said of Folgueiras. “And it has got to happen in practice. We’ve tried to call more fouls on him in practice. Two of his fouls against Michigan State, those were tough calls; the illegal screen and the block. But that’s going to happen in games. Every call isn’t going to be right. But that’s okay. That’s the cool part about college basketball.

“But what you can’t do is all the sudden just grab somebody for no reason. Okay, that one is the problem. We need to fix that one because that is the one you can control regardless if you agree or disagree with any of the others, control the one. You can’t do that. He’s got to stay out of fouls trouble. He’s just got to stop fouling.”

Iowa junior forward Tavion Banks called the Michigan State loss a learning experience, and there probably is a lot of truth in that statement considering that nobody on the Iowa roster had ever played in the Breslin Center, or in a Big Ten game for that matter.

Redshirt freshman forward Cooper Koch is the only holdover player on scholarship from the Fran McCaffery coaching era, but Koch only played briefly in 10 games last season.

“But at the end of the day, it’s kind of hard to just lose by that much,” Banks said. “I felt like practice (Thursday) was very competitive.”

Michigan State dominated Iowa on the boards in Tuesday’s game, but McCollum said it had more to do with the girth of the Michigan State players than their height.

“I don’t think it was size,” McCollum said of Michigan State’s dominance on the boards. “Now I will say this; those guys have been  in the program for four and five years, and so they’ve been in the weight program for four five years. Now that makes a difference. And that’s something that we’ve addressed the day we got here.

“But barring taking illegal performance enhancements drugs, it’s going to take a little time to get some beef on some of them. But height, not the issue, probably more the girth was probably more the issue.”

Michigan State also benefitted from its home-court advantage, which includes one of the most raucous student section in all of college basketball known as the “Izzone” in honor of legendary head coach Tom Izzo.

“They do a great job. Their fans are awesome,” McCollum said. “Their crowed is great. They understand basketball.  They’re confrontational with you without being absurd. They do a great job. I think the gym itself, the Breslin Center sets up perfect for what you’re looking for because the students are all around, and it’s not very far, and then a lot of their donors are sitting right there.”

McCollum is faced with not only rebuilding the Iowa program, but also the fan base as last season under Fran McCaffery saw attendance drop to historical lows.

The drop in attendance contributed to McCaffery’s demise after 14 seasons on the job.

McCollum has worked hard since being hired late last March to reconnect with the fans.

He hopes that his effort will be rewarded on Saturday with a strong turnout from the fans.

“We’ve worked for it,” McCollum said. “I’ve been out and we’ll continue to work for it and continue to fight for it. It’s can we create that home-court advantage? Can we create a fun atmosphere. And hopefully, we can do that in a Big Ten game on Saturday.”

Junior forward Cam Manyawu said the players have to learn from the loss at Michigan State and use it to get better.

He and Banks and Stirtz are among six former Drake players that followed McCollum to Iowa.

So they aren’t use to losing.

“We haven’t really felt getting blown out a lot,” Manyawu said. “So that was different for us. And so we had to sit on it and kind of feel that. And then the next day it was we’re going to move on kind of mentality and we’re going to get better from this and learn from this and take steps in the right direction.”

A win on Saturday against Maryland would certainly be a step in the right direction.

Maryland (6-3, 0-0) vs. Iowa (7-1, 0-1)

When: Saturday, 3 p.m.

Where: Carver-Hawkeye Arena, (14,998)

TV: FS1

Radio: Hawkeye Radio Network

Series history:  Saturday’s game is the 19th meeting in the all-time series between Iowa and Maryland. The Terps are leading, 10-8.

Maryland has won three straight in the series with two of the three victories coming in College Park.

Iowa has won three of the last four meetings in Iowa City, but the Terps won the most recent meeting — 69-67 on Jan. 24, 2024.

The Hawkeyes are 4-3 against the Terps in Carver-Hawkeye Arena.

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