New Iowa coach Ben McCollum drums up fan support in offseason. Now it’s time for players to deliver

IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — New coach Ben McCollum has worked since his hiring in March to sell his program to the Iowa fan base.

The results, he said, have been positive. Now it’s up to his players to deliver.

“They need to have a chip on their shoulder,” McCollum said at Wednesday’s media day. “You need to play with a little edge. I think that when you take over a position, there’s naturally a great deal of excitement, and I think if you’re not careful, it can create a sense of arrival.”

Iowa was 17-16 last season and missed the NCAA Tournament for a second straight year, and the Hawkeyes’ 7-13 Big Ten record was their first under .500 since 2017-18. No surprise, fans began staying away.

The Hawkeyes were 11th in Big Ten attendance, averaging 9,161 tickets sold per game in 14,988-seat Carver-Hawkeye Arena. That was one of the factors that led to the firing of Fran McCaffery, the program’s winningest coach.

It’s why McCollum, hired after leading Drake to a 31-win season and an NCAA Tournament appearance in his only year there, has tried to drum up support. He appeared at I-Club events around the state and did some glad-handing in the student section at home football games.

“The state of Iowa, that’s what they want,” McCollum said. “They want to shake your hands. They want to look you in the eyes. That’s who they want to cheer for. And so the more I can do that stuff, the better off our program is going to be.”

McCollum won four NCAA Division II national championships coaching at Northwest Missouri State before moving to Drake, where he set a single-season record for wins last season. The Bulldogs won the Missouri Valley Conference regular-season and tournament titles and advanced to the second round of the NCAA Tournament.

McCollum had to do almost a complete rebuild of the Iowa roster. Sophomore forward Cooper Koch is the lone holdover. He brought with him six players from Drake, including conference player of the year Bennett Stirtz.

Those six players will be key in selling McCollum’s vision to their new teammates.

“They’ve taught them some of the effort that needs to happen,” he said. “I want to challenge them to coach more, to coach the team a little bit more from that effort, from that toughness standpoint.”

McCollum said he and his staff were surprised there wasn’t a wider disparity between the top Division II talent they had at Northwest Missouri and the players they faced in the Missouri Valley. The jump from the Missouri Valley to the Big Ten will present a greater challenge.

“Now, you’re going up another level, and so your bigs are a little bit bigger, your guards a little bit bigger, a little bit more talented, a little more athletic,” he said.

Stirtz has played for McCollum at each of his three stops.

“In a lot of ways, he’s the same coach,” Stirtz said. “There’s obviously some things that are different that come with being a Power (Four) coach, but he’s the same coach, ever since the D-II days. Same coach, same guy.”

McCollum grew up in Iowa City and was a Hawkeye fan as a child, so he understands what the program means to the fan base. His public interactions left him with an undeniable sense that the fans are hungry to watch winning basketball.

“You know, it seems like people are excited to come out to games,” he said. “They’re excited to support the team. My message is we want them to be with us, and we want them to be a part of what we’re trying to do here, not just, ‘Hey, if we have success, then we’re going to go there.’ “It’s ‘No, we want you (to be) a part of the build of the success that we plan to have.’ ”

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