By JOHN BOHNENKAMP

Ben McCollum detailed his plan for what’s next for Iowa long before the Hawkeyes made their run to the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament.

The Hawkeyes played in some rare air over the weekend — the Sweet 16 run was the first since 1999, the Elite Eight run was the first since 1987. There is, of course, no way McCollum, in his first season as Iowa’s head coach, was going to settle for that.

A theme he talked about all season, when the Hawkeyes played in close games and lost, was about not being happy with doing that. It was a subject he brought up again after Iowa fell to Ohio State in the third round of the Big Ten Tournament.

“Trying to go from really good to being great is something that is really hard to do, and our kids need to understand ‘really good’ is not acceptable,” McCollum said. “It’s actually worse than being bad. I always cringe when I see coaches, especially new coaches, they finish, like, fourth place in their league because they never ever get a championship. Very rarely do you finish fourth and then win first place eventually because you don’t hit rock bottom.”

It’s why McCollum is probably still stewing about those last few minutes of Saturday’s 71-59 loss to Illinois in the South Regional final, when the inside power of the third-seeded Illini sapped the ninth-seeded Hawkeyes.

“It’s always hard right afterwards because, as a coach, you think about what you could have done better because it’s just the nature of your mind,” McCollum said after the game. “And you’re sitting there, ‘Man, I mismanaged this, I did this poorly, I didn’t do this. Trying to put your players in the best position to win and, you know, you don’t feel like you totally did.”

There are a lot of impressive things about McCollum, and his memory and how it fuels him is one of those things. McCollum spoke a lot during the season about the losses that came with his early success at Northwest Missouri State, and how being close-but-no-title gnawed at him until his team won four NCAA Division II national titles there.

It’s why this run will be his next motivation. The Hawkeyes caught the attention of the nation with their March journey that included a feisty second-round win over top seed and defending national champion Florida, but McCollum continued to send the message to not settle for just being in the second weekend. So the Hawkeyes dispatched Big Ten rival Nebraska in the regional semifinal, then took the regional final into the last minutes before the Illini became too much.

Iowa got the full McCollum experience this season, and there was a learning curve for everyone outside the program, but the constant was a coach whose camera was always a wide-angle lens rather than a narrow view. There would be defeats that could be maddening to the fan base, but McCollum never altered his long-term plan to fit the moment.

His starting lineups were almost always consistent — Bennett Stirtz, Cooper Koch, and Cam Manyawu started all 37 games, Tavion Banks made 35 starts and Kael Combs made 33. Eight players played in every game. 

McCollum wants to build something at Iowa, and he’s learned the best foundations are built without wavering from the blueprint. It’s a lesson he learned early at Northwest Missouri State.

“We hit rock bottom, and it’s like, ‘Dude, I don’t like that anymore,” he said after the loss to Ohio State. “I like to finish first. So then you finish first. Then you do that a few times and you get really good, and it’s like, OK, I like this feeling, but do I like it too much? Then all of a sudden, the next year, you win a national title.”

Yeah, the Hawkeyes were close, but to McCollum, “close” feels more like a chasm.

He’ll have to replace Stirtz, who had one of the best single seasons in program history in his lone year with the Hawkeyes. Iowa’s roster will need a starting point guard and more size, and McCollum will need the financial resources to find those pieces. A 24-13 season, with what the Hawkeyes did in March and the attention that came with it, is something to sell to high school players, the talent in the NCAA’s transfer portal, and the donors who will have to help pay for it all.

The Hawkeyes weren’t that far from being in the Final Four, two games from a championship. It’s a distance that is already on McCollum’s road map for the offseason.

Photo: Iowa coach Ben McCollum (left) celebrates with Kael Combs after the NCAA Tournament second-round win over Florida. (Stephen Mally/Iowa Athletic Communications)