How will Iowa’s men’s basketball team respond to a beating?

IOWA CITY - The airplane ride from East Lansing, Mich., to Cedar Rapids apparently was quiet. Very quiet.

So was the bus ride from the airport in Cedar Rapids back to campus in Iowa City.

These guys aren’t used to losing. Especially by as much as they did.

“We didn’t (talk) too much after (the game), but when everybody got home and settled in and processed the game, we all sent text messages to each other,” Iowa wing player Tavian Banks said Friday. “I know we didn’t want to be in each other’s faces at that time. But we came back the next day and everybody was smiling and laughing.

“It was ‘Hey, we lost. Let’s move forward and learn from it.’ I feel like that brought us closer a little bit.”

The Hawkeyes men’s basketball team opened its Big Ten Conference schedule Tuesday night with a thud, taking a shellacking at the hands of seventh-ranked Michigan State,, 72-51. Sometimes a final score doesn’t tell the whole story of a basketball game, but this one did.

Iowa (7-1) shot poorly, got clobbered on the boards and never really gave itself a chance.

“It was kind of like a disappointing feeling,” Iowa forward Cam Manyawu said. “You never want to play like that. We haven’t really felt getting blown out a lot, so that was different for us. But we had to kind of sit on that, feel that, then the next day it was kind of a let’s-hoop-on type of mentality. Get better from this, learn from this and take steps in the right direction.”

We’ll see if Iowa can do that Saturday when it hosts Maryland (6-3) at Carver-Hawkeye Arena. Tipoff is 3 p.m. (FS1).

Banks, Manyawu and four other Hawkeyes were part of a Drake team that went 31-4 and won a NCAA tournament game last season. They aren’t used to losing, let alone shopping at the Beatings R’ Us store.

It’ll be interesting to see how they respond. How this whole group responds.

“I hope good,” said Iowa Coach Ben McCollum. “At practice, they’ve done a good job. Sometimes, though, these are tricky situations where it’s not acceptable to ... I’m probably more process focused, but there’s also a competitor in there that says it’s not OK to lose.

“You’ve got to visit that part and fix it, but yet you can’t let it have an earth-shattering effect, like this is the end of the world. It’s kind of like you’ve got to find the balance between the two. Hopefully we found it, but we’ll find out Saturday.”

McCollum said he felt his team’s offense, which has been incredibly efficient, was much too stagnant against Michigan State, that it didn’t get into its second and third planned actions when the original one wasn’t available. The rebound disparity (37-18) wasn’t necessarily a case of failing to block out, he said, but more that MSU perimeter players crashed for boards and Iowa didn’t react well enough to that.

“We’re still on an upward trend,” he said. “Just sometimes it goes like this (motions up and down).”

This will be the first Big Ten game for Maryland (6-3), under the direction of first-year head coach Buzz Williams. The Terrapins average 78 points per game, will play uptempo and has a significant inside presence in 6-foot-9 forward-center Pharrel Payne.

Iowa, of course, is generally undersized.

“It’s always going to be there because we lost by 20, but we’ve got to move on,” Banks said. “It was one game, one loss, we’re 7-1 right now. I feel like that might put a chip on our shoulder to move forward and have great practices.”

This will be Iowa’s first home game since November 20, when it beat Chicago State.

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