HOUSTON — Ben McCollum and Luke Barnwell skipped Iowa’s pregame shootaround last Sunday. Instead, the Hawkeyes head coach and his assistant sat on a curb next to the team’s bus outside Benchmark International Arena in Tampa and pored over film of top-seeded Florida, that day’s opponent.
McCollum is never comfortable until he feels like he’s unlocked every cheat code he needs going into a game. Everyone who has been in his orbit has a story about the first-year Iowa coach cramming before a game, trying to figure out every solution for the next opponent. About 95 percent of the game plan is his team being itself and executing the same things it’s done since the preseason.
“But when we got into these late-season scenarios, there’s always that advantage in a small wrinkle,” said Zach Schneider, who was a starter for McCollum at Division II Northwest Missouri State on his first national title team, and later an assistant. “He is so laser-focused on gaining any half a percent or percent advantage that he can find. And his mood can be determined whether he’s figured that out yet or not.”
Until then …
“Beyond miserable,” McCollum admits.
The misery has been worth it.
In 17 seasons as a head coach, McCollum has won 13 regular-season championships, nine conference tournaments, four DII national titles and is now 4-1 in the Division I NCAA Tournament. On Saturday, he has a chance to take Iowa, a No. 9 seed, to its first Final Four since 1980 with a win over Illinois.
McCollum said his aha moment in the Florida prep came around 3 a.m. last Sunday morning, his film study providing the vision of exactly how he wanted to attack Florida’s ball screen coverage.
“They were going to be in a drop, and I knew they were gonna stay home on Bennett (Stirtz), and so we just hit the pocket,” McCollum explained. “But you can’t score on those bigs consistently unless you create enough space for them to score. So then you’d have to create space with your spacing. But you had to control tempo enough that you didn’t just shoot the first pocket. Because if they got it in transition, then it was a problem. So we had to run some smoke into the show, and it seemed to work.”
That’s the simplified version, if you can believe it.
This is what it looked like:
“His ability to regurgitate all that, like cramming for a test, is unbelievable,” said Barnwell, who watched last weekend as McCollum went from the curb to the practice floor with a few scribbled notes and succinctly delivered the plan, which his team executed hours later to near perfection in a 73-72 upset of the defending champion Gators.
The way McCollum finds the answers to the test is with information overload, and Barnwell had it easy for Florida. Nebraska, Iowa’s Sweet 16 opponent on Thursday, was a complicated scout because the Huskers play a unique no-middle defense and run intricate sets on the offensive end.
Iowa chief of staff Jesse Shaw was tasked with that scout, and his film cut-up was so thorough that he said the spinning wheel of death on his MacBook spun for 15 minutes before it would finally load.
“We’re trying to be ready for every single scenario that could happen,” Shaw said.
The laundry list of what McCollum wanted to be prepped for against Nebraska included:
• Baseline out of bounds plays, because Nebraska was the 12th-most efficient team in the country on those, per Synergy. (Shaw estimated he watched every BLOB from Nebraska’s season six or seven times.)
• Nebraska center Rienk Mast shooting 3-pointers off pin downs and which side he makes them from. (Shaw discovered Mast had only attempted three since the two teams played last on March 8, and he’d made one going both directions.)
• McCollum noticed the Huskers had been driving the ball to the middle more lately, so Shaw tracked every direction they drove all year. (“(Sam) Hoiberg on the left wing had driven left 72 times and right 18 times,” Shaw said, which he reported to McCollum, who countered by asking what he’d done lately, which forced Shaw to look at those clips again.)
• Every Pryce Sandfort 3, charting the direction he came from. (A grad assistant also tracked this so they could compare notes.)
• Every Nebraska post touch for the year, where on the floor the post-up happened and where the ball was passed from.
Bennett Stirtz (left) is the only Iowa player who has played for McCollum for more than two seasons. (Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
Shaw thought he had everything covered, then he and McCollum met. McCollum wanted to know the hand that the post feeder fed the post with and who passed it.
“I went down to the assistants,” Shaw said, “and I said, ‘He wants to know what play they’re going to run if (Nebraska coach) Fred (Hoiberg) wears a red polo and what they’re going to run if he wears a black one.’”
One reason McCollum had to bring four players with him two years ago when he left Northwest Missouri State to go to Drake was to have continuity in executing his system and the last-minute tweaks he makes. He doubled down on continuity by bringing five of his Drake players to Iowa.
Bennett Stirtz, however, is the only player who has been with McCollum for more than two years, and he had to adjust to how complicated McCollum gets when he morphs into mad scientist mode in the final 24 hours before tip-off.
“My Northwest teams, I could defend Sam Hoiberg, every ball screen and handoff differently,” McCollum said. “I could defend every single ball screen and hand off for (Jamarques) Lawrence differently than with Hoiberg. I could defend Pryce Sandfort’s every single thing differently, including the pin downs and the down screens. And they could do it, and they could do it fast.
“If I do it with these guys, they’ll slow down.”
Ryan Welty, who played for McCollum’s first two title teams, said the Bearcats could always decipher what McCollum wanted because he made everything seem so simple.
McCollum often sent text messages in the middle of the night to his big men with clips of how he wanted them to set ball screens the next day, and it worked.
“He sees just the small details on film that the average player or average coach wouldn’t necessarily see,” Welty said.
McCollum does his best work in the final 24 hours before tip.
“If I’m pressed against the deadline, then I can hyper focus,” he said. “But if it’s three days before and my deadline’s three days away, I can focus, but it’s harder for me.”
At the Division II level, the cramming went to another level because the first three rounds of the tournament would be played over three days. The final three rounds happened with just a day between each game.
“I don’t know if that man ever slept in March,” Welty said.
Not much has changed.
“He’s always up,” Barnwell said.
There is slightly more rest built in at the Division I level, and the most sleep usually comes the night of a win when there’s at least one day to prep for the next one. McCollum went around midnight following the Nebraska win Thursday and was up at 4 a.m. on Friday.
It’s also easier because he has a huge staff to assist with digging in on the little details, but he still does much of his own research. There’s an adrenaline rush in finding the answer. The more creativity required, the more satisfying.
And it’s a little ironic that the opposing coach in Saturday’s Elite Eight, the Illini’s Brad Underwood, actually helped him unlock the cheat code when he won his first national championship in 2017.
Ben McCollum’s aha moment for Iowa’s game plan against Florida came at 3 a.m. (Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
McCollum’s opponent in 2017, Fairmont State, was coached by Jerrod Calhoun, recently hired to be Cincinnati’s new coach, who began his career as a student assistant on Bob Huggins’ staff at Cincinnati and later worked for Huggins at West Virginia. At the time, Huggins was winning with a full-court press — dubbed “Press Virginia” — and Calhoun had adopted the system as well.
McCollum decided to see if any team had success that year against West Virginia. He remembered that Underwood had worked for Huggins for a year at Kansas State and figured he’d know how to attack his old boss’ press. It turned out that Underwood’s Oklahoma State team had the most efficient performance against the Mountaineers that year.
The morning of the title game, McCollum taught his team Underwood’s press-breaker, which Underwood called “Cowboy,” copying the alignment and some of the strategy behind it, and then putting his own wrinkle in by setting a ball screen in the back court.
Northwest Missouri State won 71-61, handling the press with ease.
A few years later, Underwood’s son Tyler, who now runs his offense, started studying McCollum’s Northwest Missouri State during the pandemic. There are some McCollumisms to the way the Illini set ball screens.
On Saturday, the two will square off with each trying to reach their first Final Four. The Illini are favored and won the previous meeting, 75-69, back on Jan. 11.
But right after that game, McCollum said, he figured out how he would attack the Illini if they played again.
He’ll be spending Friday night making sure that plan is perfect, maybe even making a last-second tweak on Saturday morning, and likely keeping his assistants on their toes.
Schneider, who is no longer coaching, flew to Houston on Friday afternoon to be there to see if his old boss can get to the Final Four.
Welty was on the fence about coming to the game — flights from Kansas City were near $1,000 — but he figured he might be able to make the trip to Indianapolis next week if the Hawkeyes win. He has faith McCollum will provide that opportunity.
“I’ll take McCollum in March,” he said, “over anybody.”
