By JOHN BOHNENKAMP

CHICAGO — He has talked all season about not wanting his team to settle for “good.”

Great teams, Iowa coach Ben McCollum has said, win the close games, and it was a subject he brought up again after the Hawkeyes were eliminated from the Big Ten Tournament with a 72-69 loss to Ohio State in Thursday’s third-round game at the United Center.

The Hawkeyes are 21-12 and likely bound for the NCAA Tournament, big steps in McCollum’s first year as coach with an almost-entirely new roster put together in the spring.

But there have been several games this season, and this one was right in with that group, where plays here or there, the ones that separate good teams from great teams, make a difference between a big win and a frustrating loss.

“I’m trying to get them to understand that you’re not just a win-a-conference-tournament-game team, you’re not just a make-the-NCAA-tournament team,” McCollum said. “You need to be able to win those games.”

The resumé Iowa has built for the postseason is uneven. The two games in this tournament fit that description — a solid 75-64 win over Maryland on Wednesday, and then this one, when the ninth-seeded Hawkeyes got off to a strong start, then let the eighth-seeded Buckeyes (21-11) take control of the game in the second half. And even with that, Iowa had two chances to tie the game in the final seconds and missed both shots.

“I think we’ve got a good team,” McCollum said. “I think sometimes we get ourselves to accept second place, accept good. And I think that’s a scary deal. I think we need to try to find ‘great.’”

Senior guard Bennett Stirtz, sitting next to McCollum in the post-game press conference, passed along the same theme.

“Totally agree with him,” said Stirtz, the only Hawkeye to score in double figures with 17 points. “Sometimes I think we believe that we’re good, but our facial expressions say otherwise. I think he sees that. So, yeah, you’ve just got to trust him with what he’s saying. He’s trying to make us better, and he’s trying to make us win. So you’ve got to listen.”

It was at this tournament last season when the Hawkeyes were eliminated in a second-round loss to Illinois, coach Fran McCaffery was fired the day after, and Iowa didn’t play in a postseason tournament.

“I want our guys to understand that just because you’ve accomplished some things and everybody wants to compare it to last year, don’t do that,” McCollum said. “Last year is last year. The last coaching staff is the last coaching staff. I have zero interest in comparing the two, and I don’t want our guys to either. We’ve got to compare ourselves to ourselves, and we can be better than that.”

Great teams win the sequences that make a difference in games like this.

Take the sequence in the second half, when Iowa, which trailed by as much as 16 points in the second half, got to within 59-53 with 7:29 to play. Ohio State’s Christoph Tully, a handful for the Hawkeyes all day, scored at the other end, then Stirtz missed an open 3-pointer. Ohio State’s John Mobley Jr., then hit a 3-pointer 20 seconds later, and the Buckeyes’ lead was 11 points.

Iowa was within 68-62 with 3:33 left when Ohio State’s Bruce Thornton missed a 3-pointer. Alvaro Folgueiras came away with the rebound and started a fast break, hitting an open Isaia Howard for what looked to be an easy layup. Howard, though, lost the ball off his foot and it rolled out of bounds.

“It’s frustrating,” Iowa guard Brendan Hausen said. “But we did it to ourselves — 50/50 balls, dumb fouls, just small things we didn’t do. We have to do those things to be better.”

“I think often, this is why people sit in mediocrity for a long time because they start to fall in love with ‘really good,’” McCollum said. “ I probably had that happen to me when I was in, like, my seventh or eighth year (at Northwest Missouri State, his first head coaching job). We went to three straight Sweet 16s and lost by one, two points. I don’t remember the exact scores. And I always thought we were really good and close.

Then I realized that was the biggest issue that we had — the fact that we were settling for ‘really good.’”

The Hawkeyes had trouble handling Ohio State all day, especially Thornton, who had the final 10 points in a 13-2 run that put Ohio State up 51-35 with 13:55 to play. Thornton led the Buckeyes with 24 points, hitting 10 of 14 shots.

“He’s a great player,” Stirtz said. “I think we played a really good defense when we played them at home, and he just was feeling it today. He’s obviously a great player, but I thought it started with us, and our coverage wasn’t that great.”

The Hawkeyes, though, still had chances to tie the game in the final seconds, but couldn’t convert, the final missed opportunities on a day full of them.

The first with 7.2 seconds, when Hausen missed a 3-pointer off an inbounds play, a shot that looked a lot more out of control than reality, McCollum said.

McCollum knew the Hawkeyes weren’t going to be able to get the ball to Stirtz, their primary option on the play. He also knew the Buckeyes were going to foul before someone could get up a shot.

Hausen knew the same thing.

“They said they were going to foul coming out of the timeout,” Hausen said.

Hausen shot after immediately receiving the ball. He said there was contact on the play, but no foul was called. The ball bounced off the top of the backboard.

“To be honest, I think they tried to foul him,” McCollum said. “I’d have to go back and watch it, but I think they tried to foul him. That’s why he shot that. So it looked worse than it actually was. You’ll see the kid reach it and kind of shove him. And so he shot it, knowing he was going to get fouled.

“It was actually a pretty crafty move. It looked worse, but like looking back on it, it was a pretty vet move. We knew we were going to have a tough time getting Bennett open, and if we did get him open, they were going to foul the other way. So you run him off that side, ran Brendan off the other side, and then Tate (Sage) in the middle. We were just trying to get them to foul us for the most part, and then if they reached in, we were going to try to get a shot off and get three free throws.”

Iowa fouled Tilly on the inbounds play, but Tilly missed the front end of the one-and-bonus. Folgueiras was fouled after getting the rebound and headed to the free-throw line, giving the Hawkeyes another chance.

Folgueiras said his plan was to make the first free throw and miss the second, but he missed the first. Howard tracked down the long rebound and launched a 3-pointer that missed as the horn sounded.

“I just grabbed the ball and shot it,” Howard said. “It felt good, honestly.”

There was a lot of feel-good to this game, and that’s what McCollum wants to avoid.

“Trying to go from really good to being great is something that is really hard to do, and our kids need to understand that ‘really good’ is not acceptable,” he said. “It’s actually worse than being bad.”

Photo: Iowa’s Bennett Stirtz (14) and Cam Manyawu (3) check out a replay on the United Center’s video screens as teammate Cooper Koch waits with them for a ruling during a replay review in Thursday’s game. (Stephen Mally/UI Athletic Communications)