By JOHN BOHNENKAMP

There were going to be nicks and gashes in Ben McCollum’s first season as Iowa’s men’s basketball coach — the losses you endure, the losses you lament.

“Scars” are what McCollum called them after Saturday’s 78-57 loss to 13th-ranked Purdue at Carver-Hawkeye Arena.

It’s why McCollum’s post-game press conference was measured instead of the fury borne from frustration at the opportunities lost last week.

“I think some coaches, they come in here and they say it’s unacceptable,” McCollum said, “And it is, you know. We need to play hard, we need to be better than that.

“But you don’t sit here and say, ‘I’m embarrassed,’ because I’m not embarrassed. They kicked our butt for us. I’m not embarrassed. It’s a part of the process. It’s a part of it. I don’t like it. I haven’t had that happen in a lot of years. And to be quite honest, you know, it’s humbling and it’s good sometimes for the soul, I don’t want to feel it very often, but we’re going to get ourselves there.”

McCollum then leaned into something someone — he wasn’t sure if it was his wife or his mother — told him.

“It was the David/Goliath thing — to make David a king. God gave him Goliath instead of a crown,” McCollum said. “And so it’s kind of one of those things that we’re now facing our Goliath. And we faced it a few times, and we faced it again tonight, but we’ve got to keep fighting. We’ve got to keep competing. I’m not going to sit here and, like, hang my head and pout. That’s not what I do. I just fight harder, and we’re going to fight harder.”

The Hawkeyes are on a two-game losing streak — a 77-70 loss at Maryland on Wednesday which was one of those games you shouldn’t drop, and then Saturday’s game against a Purdue team that is a bad matchup for a lot of teams. This comes after a six-game winning streak.

Such is life in a program in its first year under a new coach, and such is life in a 20-game Big Ten schedule that can grind even the best of teams. 

The Hawkeyes are 18-7 overall, 8-6 and tied for eighth place with Ohio State in the conference. They are 27th in the NCAA NET and rank 37th in Wins Above Bubble, a new metric the NCAA Tournament selection committee will use this season.

Those aren’t panic numbers, they are the numbers of a team with a flawed roster put together after McCollum was hired last spring that sometimes can overcome its flaws and sometimes cannot.

Saturday’s loss was one of those cannots. The Hawkeyes challenged Purdue for much of the 79-72 loss back in January, but couldn’t challenge the Boilermakers in front of the first sellout crowd of the season at Carver-Hawkeye.

Purdue coach Matt Painter referred to Iowa’s box score, which had a whole lot of Bennett Stirtz and not much from anyone else. Stirtz had 19 points, and the only other player close to double figures was Cam Manyawu with eight points.

Kael Combs, Tate Sage and Tavion Banks combined for nine 3-pointers when the Boilermakers and Hawkeyes played the first time. The trio didn’t have any on Saturday.

Stirtz had 32 points in Wednesday’s loss at Maryland, a game to be filed in the losses-to-lament column because the Terrapins have won just three Big Ten games this season and 10 overall. Banks had 13 points in that game, but the Hawkeyes needed more help.

“They need those makes,” Painter said. “There’s just no way around it. They need those makes. They need scoring from some other guys in other areas to be able to get that balance.”

The struggles left McCollum searching for answers — at one point midway through the first half, he sent in Brendan Hausen, Trevin Jirak, Tate Sage and Isaia Howard at the same time, a hockey-ish line change that was an effort to find something, anything, for a team that needed something or anything.

“You’ve just got to have a pulse on your team, and you’ve got to try to get their attention,” Painter said. “Like tonight, (McCollum) just tried to mix it up. He just was sending guys in there because he was just trying to find a group that can have some success together and build off of it. And that’s tough.”

McCollum has shown that even with a roster with so many players that he had to get to know as well as figuring out how they would fit with the players he did know, he can understand his team’s pulse, no matter how erratic that pulse can be at times.

McCollum saw in Purdue what he wants his team to be, this season and beyond. The Boilermakers have taken their hits this season — they had a three-game losing streak not long after they faced the Hawkeyes the first time.

“I thought they were pretty tuned up,” McCollum said. “I thought they got shockingly better after they lost to Indiana (the last defeat in the losing streak). They changed some things. They kind of toed the line a little bit more with their guys. Completely different team than we faced the first time.

“And that’s a guide. And I told our guys, they have scars. Some of them, Braden (Smith) and Fletcher (Loyer), were on the team that got beat in the first round (of the NCAA Tournament) by (16th seed Fairleigh Dickinson). And they got scars from that, and that makes them tougher. And they’re a tough team. And I thought they played great.”

The scars are forming on these Hawkeyes, no surprise for a program with a new roster under a new coach.

“Sometimes you have to go through those things to try to get what you want, which is ultimately the crown, which we talk about in the future,” McCollum said. “I knew it was going to be tough when I came here, so I’m not surprised.”

McCollum thought back to last season at Drake, when in his one year with the Bulldogs led them to 31 wins, the Missouri Valley Conference’s regular-season and tournament titles, and an NCAA Tournament appearance. He only lost back-to-back games once last season, but in this season he’s dealt with a three-game losing streak as well as this current pair of defeats last week after a six-game winning streak that got the Hawkeyes into the national rankings.

“I would like it to be exactly like it was, like Drake last year, and it was trending that direction, then we got our butts kicked, and so it’s not that direction right now,” McCollum said. “So we just need to recalibrate and continue to fight and continue to grow and get better.”

Photo: Iowa coach Ben McCollum is dealing with another stretch of back-to-back losses in his first season with the Hawkeyes. (Keith Gillett/Icon Sportswire)