By JOHN BOHNENKAMP

IOWA CITY — Ben McCollum learned about “goals” early in his career.

“I think my first year as a coach I had a lot of goals,” McCollum said at Iowa’s men’s basketball media day on Monday. “We didn’t attain any of them, and I think we might have even finished last. So I’m done with goals.”

McCollum’s first season as the Hawkeyes’ head coach last season ended with a run to the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament, rare air for a program that hadn’t reached that point since 1987 and hadn’t reached the second weekend of the tournament since 1999.

Naturally, there will be expectations with this team because of that run, but McCollum is playing a long game with this program.

“The unwritten rules,” McCollum said, “are happening.”

“Guys are consistent super early for everything, for all their workouts, for weights, all those different things,” he continued. “Just all those little things that you’re not having to hold people accountable to because they just do them.”

Still, getting that far last March meant a lot within the program, guard Isaia Howard said.

“Everybody has that goal, no matter what team you’re on,” Howard said.

This will be a team with a different look. The Hawkeyes won’t have guard Bennett Stirtz, the first-round NBA draft pick who was what McCollum described “the gravity” of the team. They won’t have the steadiness of Tavion Banks or the mercurial Alvaro Folgueiras, who could hit big shots but could also disappear.

Instead what McCollum has is a deep roster that could feature any number of combinations throughout the season.

“It’s been a unique summer and even fall just trying to figure out what we’re going to hang our hat on,” McCollum said. “It does take a little time when you have such a new group. Even though we have 10 returners, it’s just so new because everybody’s role is completely different than what it was the year before just because you don’t have a Bennett.

“We’re still trying to figure that out, but I think we’re moving in the right direction.”
McCollum said this summer he knew what he has for the first 35 minutes of the game, but he still needed to find those who will command the final five.

“It’s probably a little bit of a trial by error,” he said.”I mean, it’s one of those things that a lot of times it figures itself out throughout the season, just like your lineup does.”

“You don’t have that, you know, go-to guy who you need a bucket,” forward Cam Manyawu said. “You know where it’s going. You know who you can depend on. So you have to find that. You know we’re still trying to find that, but I’m confident that we’ll be able to find that.”

McCollum said this is a team of “low ego” and pointed to how there wasn’t much of a roster turnover that is so common with programs in this transfer-portal era.

“I think from an ego perspective, I think getting guys to stay and want to build something (is important),” McCollum said. “Guys that always search for the greener grass, a lot of times it doesn’t work out for them. You know, comparison is the thief of joy.

“I think our guys do a good job of not doing that, making sure that they understand what they’ve been given here rather than always looking, OK, well, I could get this there. That’s part of the ego process.”

But McCollum wants some feistiness internally to go with that absence of ego — “juice” is what the coach called it.

“Sometimes when you have success, there needs to be some confrontation within your team,” he said. “I think sometimes when you get too many just great kids — not too many, you can never have too many great kids — I think sometimes you do have to have a little more edge, and I think that’s one thing that we need to grow into where guys are able to hold each other accountable, guys are able to kind of get after it.”

The “goals,” McCollum said, are what happens inside the program.

“Yeah, my goals are to just play really, really hard, have a great day every single day, create that habit, make sure that we’re intentional about those things,” he said. “I think our group has done that, but that’s how you build a real program that sustains itself. You really focus on all your daily habits and how it feels to be around your program.

“If we focus on those, we think that the external goals will take care of themselves.”

Photo: Iowa coach Ben McCollum speaks during Monday’s Media Day at Carver-Hawkeye Arena. (Stephen Mally/hawkeyesports.com)