Ben McCollum sparks another turnaround as Iowa returns to the NCAA Tournament, Clemson on deck
There were very few people outside Iowa who thought Ben McCollum could take Drake, a program with sporadic success throughout the years, to the NCAA Tournament last year in his first season moving up from Division II.
Well, he did it. Then he did almost the exact same thing with Iowa this season.
McCollum moved just down the road from the Drake campus in Des Moines to Iowa City, and took control of a program at Iowa that had leveled out under former coach Fran McCaffery. The Hawkeyes had missed the NCAA Tournament each of the past two seasons, and in the enlarged and increasingly tough Big Ten, seemed to be falling slowly behind their biggest rivals.
Yet behind another influx of transfers, including Bennett Stirtz — who first followed him from Northwest Missouri State to Drake, and then from Drake to Iowa — McCollum has the Hawkeyes dancing again. They are the No. 9 seed in the South Region and will play eighth-seeded Clemson on Friday in Tampa, Florida, with defending champion Florida possibly awaiting in the second round.
“It’s been a long road,” McCollum said. “It feels like it’s been two years, just because we’ve moved two straight years, and tried to reinvigorate two great programs. Obviously we were fortunate to get this one off the ground, but we had great players help us with that, my staff, and you saw the result of that, making the NCAA Tournament.”
Now the trick is to win some games, something Iowa failed to do in each of its last two NCAA trips.
Oh, McCollum has some experience with that as well.
Not only did he take Drake to the NCAA Tournament as a No. 11 seed last year, he led the Bulldogs to a first-round upset of sixth-seeded Missouri. And the Bulldogs had Texas Tech on the ropes in the second round before losing a close game.
“We’re excited to be able to play. We want to play well now,” McCollum said. “We have an opportunity to prepare for another opponent. For our fans in Tampa, it’s a great destination. We’re excited about the opportunity and we’re going to make the most of it.”
It hasn’t exactly been a charmed season for the Hawkeyes.
They went through some growing pains early. They had a three-game skid in January. It seemed that every time they were in a close game, they came up on the losing end, including in the Big Ten Tournament, when they lost 72-69 to Ohio State last week. That did give them a few extra days of rest and contemplation.
“I think we’ve sharpened some things the last couple of days, which is good. The guys wanted to clear their minds and now you’ve had that opportunity,” McCollum said. “And now you have a whole week to prepare, and we’ll be ready to go.”
McCollum has some more positive history on his side in this way: The only other first-year Iowa coach to take his team to the NCAA Tournament was Tom Davis some 39 years ago, and he wound up taking the Hawkeyes all the way to the Elite Eight.
They haven’t been that far since then.
But if anybody knows how to win tournament games, it might be McCollum — even if so many were at the Division II level. He won four national championships in a six-year span at Northwest Missouri State, and one of those years in between the tournament was canceled altogether because of the pandemic.
“The thing with the Division II tournaments, it’s so different, because you face a team that’s almost your equal. Once we got out of the Sweet 16, it was almost easier, because our region, we had three leagues that were among the best in the country,” McCollum said. “So all those years in D2 have helped so much from a tournament perspective.”
Nobody is comparing the Division II Tournament to March Madness, of course. McCollum knows from last year that this is a whole different beast.
“We’re excited to be able to compete,” he said.
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AP March Madness bracket: https://apnews.com/hub/ncaa-mens-bracket and coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/march-madness