By JOHN BOHNENKAMP

IOWA CITY, Iowa — There wasn’t much for the Iowa men’s basketball team to talk about on the flight home from Tuesday’s 71-52 loss at Michigan State in the Big Ten opener for both teams.

The talking came later.

“We didn’t say much to each other after (the game),” forward Tavion Banks said on Friday. “But when everybody got home and settled in and processed after the game, we all sent the text messages to each other.”

“It was just kind of a ‘disappointed’ feeling,” forward Cam Manyawu said. “You never should ever want to play like that.”

Banks and Manyawu were on the Drake team that lost just four games last season. Three of those defeats were by single digits, and the Bulldogs’ worst loss was 77-64 to Texas Tech in the second round of the NCAA Tournament.

“We haven’t really felt getting blown out a lot,” Manyawu said. “And so that was different for us. So we kind of had to sit on it. The next day was a ‘We’re gonna 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.”

“The next day we came back, everybody smiled and laughed and then it was just, you know, ‘Hey, we lost. Let’s move forward and learn from it,’” Banks said. “I feel like that brought us closer a little bit.”

Iowa coach Ben McCollum likes how his team responded.

“You know, in practice, they’ve done a good job,” he said. “I think sometimes, though, these are tricky situations where it’s not acceptable to (lose). I’m probably more process focused, but there’s also a competitor in there that says it’s not OK 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 the end of the world.’ It’s kind of like you’ve got to find that balance between the two, and hopefully we found it.”

There was still the post-mortem to be done on the loss, and McCollum made sure to go through it with his team. Iowa shot 37.8% for the game and was outrebounded 37-18.

“We didn’t get in and out of actions very quickly,” McCollum said. “Our offense was very stagnant — we didn’t get to the next action consistently enough. And you need to get to multiple actions against them. I thought from a box-out perspective that we did OK, I think what happened was a lot of their perimeter guys came in and crashed, and we didn’t do a good job of staying engaged. From a defensive perspective there, it wasn’t a size issue as much as it was just a you-didn’t-box-them-out issue. That was the problem.”

The Hawkeyes (7-1, 0-1 Big Ten) get back on their home court for Saturday’s 3 p.m. game against Maryland (6-3, 0-0). They haven’t been at Carver-Hawkeye Arena for a game since the 93-54 win over Chicago State on November 20.

“We’ve been on the road a lot, so it’s nice to be back at home,” Manyawu said.

The Hawkeyes weren’t thinking that much about Tuesday.

“I don’t think losing is ever fun,” McCollum said.  But no, I’m not going to go the other direction. We’re still fighting. I mean, we’re still on an upward trend, but sometimes it goes like this.”

McCollum moved his hands to signify that there will be a few bumps in the process.

“I would say it’s balancing that out, just use us getting our butt kicked by 20 to kick the other team’s butt by at least 30 or 40,” Banks said. “That’s the plan, too, but most definitely it’s just staying together. We’ve got to learn from the last game, stay together and just keep pushing forward. And honestly, just just playing our game and being ourselves is the main goal., because the Michigan State game, we weren’t ourselves.”

Photo: Iowa’s Bennett Stirtz (center) watches from the bench during Tuesday’s loss at Michigan State. (Adam Ruff/Icon Sportswire)