By Mike Hlas

IOWA CITY, Iowa – ESPN’s Jeff Borzello said Friday that Iowa Athletics Director Beth Goetz gave Hawkeyes men’s basketball coach Ben McCollum a raise and an extension on his contract. Last year, McCollum signed a 6-year, $22.75 million contract with Iowa. That is what ADs do when their coaches are hot properties. You give them a raise/extension to tell everyone you’re being competitive and have every intention of keeping the popular coach at your school.

And, the coach tells everyone he’s sticking around for a while.

Iowa hasn’t made any such announcement as of Friday at 1 p.m., and probably wanted to break the news itself, but somebody told ESPN. All that’s left is to share the details and then go enjoy summer.

Everybody’s happy. No interlopers will block the Hawkeyes’ good times to come. AD Jamie Pollard and men’s basketball coach T.J. Otzelberger did the same dance recently at Iowa State.

Otzelberger had no intention of departing Iowa State, nor did McCollum at Iowa. McCollum and Iowa got mileage out of the report that McCollum quickly told North Carolina thanks, but no thanks when Carolina made a call to him to gauge his interest in the then-open coaching job in Chapel Hill. Look! Our guy turned away mighty, mighty North Carolina!

What we don’t know and probably won’t know is how strongly North Carolina was interested in McCollum. Maybe UNC would have come after McCollum with fury had he expressed a hint of attraction to the blueblood in Carolina blue. Maybe the Tar Heels were just looking to see who might be interested if things with candidate Michael Malone had broken down. Malone was linked to the job almost immediately after UNC fired Hubert Davis.

The school gave Malone a 6-year, $50 million deal. That’s a lot more dough than McCollum will be getting at Iowa. Hey, it’s more than any Big Ten coach is making.

As for the reason McCollum got the raise/extension, that stems from two weeks in March and the power of the NCAA tournament.

Interest in the Hawkeye men didn’t boil over during the regular-season, which Iowa ended with records of 10-10 in Big Ten play and 20-11 overall. Nor did it after the Hawkeyes lost to Ohio State in the Big Ten tournament, failing to reach the quarterfinals.

Then, however, came the Big Dance. The Hawkeyes changed their narrative by beating Clemson in the first round, then knocking out No. 1-seed Florida in the second round. That in itself was a game-changer, but then Iowa then eliminated Nebraska in the Hawkeyes’ first Sweet 16 game in 27 years before it battled Illinois hard in the Elite Eight before the Illini prevailed.

Iowa’s average home attendance of 11,280 in the 2025-26 season is headed upward next season. McCollum, whose 17-year career as a head coach has been all about winning, has everyone convinced many more good days are on the horizon. Unless terms of the revised contract are surprising, Goetz isn’t breaking the bank. Yet, she is buying a positive splash of happy news for her customers.

With that piece of business in the rearview mirror, we’ll now wait for November to see the Bennett Stirtz-less Hawkeyes. Point guards of Stirtz’s skills and savvy are rarities. However, McCollum was the point guard whisperer through his years at Northwest Missouri State, and one suspects that won’t stop just because Stirtz is in next week’s NBA Combine instead of Iowa City.

As we know, McCollum is swimming with sharks in the Big Ten. Iowa finished in ninth-place in the conference and is still without a regular-season league title since (gulp) 1979. But what we also know is McCollum has quite a career postseason record. That is where nearly all of college basketball’s lingering memories are made, and the Hawkeyes have some fresh ones that are warm indeed.