By JOHN BOHNENKAMP

IOWA CITY, Iowa — Ben McCollum’s first Iowa team is still a “work in progress,” the coach said on Monday, but there’s no more time to prepare.

The season starts on Tuesday night with a game against Robert Morris at Carver-Hawkeye Arena.

McCollum has gotten to see his team twice against opposing teams, with “secret” scrimmages against Saint Louis and Texas Tech, but now these games count.

“I’ll be curious to see,” McCollum said. “Trying to figure out lineups, trying to figure out who plays with who. So it might take us a little while to figure that stuff out, but we’re getting there.”

McCollum said the scrimmages did give him a different perspective on his team, an almost entirely new roster — forward Cooper Koch is the lone returning scholarship player from Fran McCaffery’s team last year.

“It is just trying to figure out what we’re going to be from an offensive perspective, because we’ve got a very unique lineup where some of our best shooters aren’t our best defenders, and vice versa,” McCollum said. “And so you’ve got to mix and match the right lineup, to be able to create space on the floor, but yet get enough stops from a physicality perspective and and then also who clicks with who. And you’re bringing 13 guys together. So it’s pretty tricky.”

“It’s going to be huge for us,” said guard Bennett Stirtz, one of the six players who followed McCollum from Drake. “Just looking forward to it. We’re going to learn a lot, just with all the rotations and everything like that, but just excited for us to show the people who don’t really have a spotlight on them, show what they’re about and how hard they play.”

The work to figure out who works well together is something McCollum expected taking over the Hawkeyes.

“Any time you take over a new program like this, that’s kind of part of the deal,” McCollum said. “You start to say, ‘OK, we’re going to play these guys,’ and then all of a sudden, those guys don’t work. You’ve got to be able to adapt to that pretty quick.”
McCollum will have a full roster, including guard Tavion Banks, who was charged with  disorderly conduct and public intoxication after an incident in downtown Iowa City in mid-October.

“It was internal stuff that we disciplined him with and continue to,” McCollum said. “Sometimes I think the greatest punishment is making sure that you learn from your mistakes. And then two, OK, how do we offer you an opportunity to now give back and do some things like that for your initial stuff? Eventually, then, there’s just heavy consequences after that. You know, you get one strike, but start to get to two and three, then you’ve got problems.”

For Stirtz, it’s a chance to play on the biggest stage of his career. He started out at Northwest Missouri State, an NCAA Division II school, then moved with McCollum to Drake.

Home games in 15,000-seat Carver-Hawkeye Arena will be a new experience. Asked what he is looking for in the opener, Stirtz said, “A lot of energy. Make it loud.”

McCollum himself expects the usual game-day nerves.

“Game days are always miserable until the game starts, so I’ll probably experience the game day misery, as I would call it,” McCollum said. “And then once the game starts, then you’re ready to rock and roll, and then it’s fun. Probably, just like any other game, you probably overthink 25 different scenarios and try to adjust things all the way up until game time. And then, you know, once you get to the game, it still ultimately comes down to who’s going to give effort, who’s going to fight harder, those kinds of things. So, no different than any other game routine for me.”