By JOHN BOHNENKAMP
CORALVILLE, Iowa — Ben McCollum would prefer to do his preseason preparation in private.
Iowa’s 88-64 exhibition win over the University of Illinois Springfield on Tuesday was the lone public look at the Hawkeyes before next Tuesday’s season opener against Lipscomb, and for McCollum, in his second season as Iowa’s coach, it wasn’t a good look.
“Typical exhibition or scrimmage for teams of mine,” McCollum said. “This is why I do them in private. We just didn’t play very well.”
McCollum said the Hawkeyes looked better in the “secret” scrimmages with Texas Tech and Saint Louis earlier this month. Playing in front of 4,718 fans at Xtream Arena was a different atmosphere.
“I don’t ever feel like you’re totally ready (for the season to start). You know what I’m saying?” McCollum said. “Like, if you would have seen us (against) Texas Tech, I thought we were just OK. Saw us (against) SLU, you’d be like, ‘Oh my God, goodness, they’re going to be elite.’ Saw us tonight, didn’t play real well.”
A lot of it, McCollum said, was the consistent changes in lineup combinations. The rotations the Hawkeyes showed in this game, he said, aren’t going to resemble the ones they’ll be using in the regular season.
“You’re trying to figure out lineups that work together, and so you oversub,” McCollum said. “And when you oversub, guys can’t get a rhythm. They can’t figure out who they’re playing with. That happens. But we did the same thing in our scrimmages too.”
“I feel like tonight it was just just settling in,” said guard Kael Combs, who led the Hawkeyes with 13 points. “I mean it was early, different team, new arena, first time playing with each other other than scrimmages, so it just kind of feeling everything out. And then in the second half, I feel like our flow got a lot better.”
McCollum went with a starting lineup of Combs, Isaia Howard, Tate Sage, Cooper Koch and Andrew McKeever, but that was based more on experience than anything else. Koch, Howard, Combs, Sage and Peyton McCollum, the coach’s son, were the only players to log more than 20 minutes. Koch, Trevin Jirak and Peyton McCollum were the other players who scored in double figures, each scoring 10 points.
A lament for Ben McCollum since the summer has been that he doesn’t know who will be the players who will take those last five minutes of the game. And there’s a search for that, as he had called it, “gravity” for the team, a player that will be the center of the Hawkeyes’ orbit.
“You take all the scrimmages, you take all the practices, and you figure out, OK, these groupings of three are really good, and then this grouping of three is really good, and then this grouping of three, and you try to find groups just because we don’t have like a star, and so we’re going to have to be more group-oriented on some of those things,” McCollum said.
The Hawkeyes are, as McCollum said, “a work in progress,” and the season is a week away.
“Now it’s for real, and I’m excited,” McCollum said. “I’m done with scrimmages and exhibitions, so thank the Lord.”
Photo: Iowa’s Ty’Reek Coleman (1) drives to the basket against UIS defenders Isaiah Davis (2) and Quentin Parker. (Stephen Mally/hawkeyesports.com)
