Keying in on the little things could be a driving factor in Iowa men’s basketball’s game at No. 5 Purdue

IOWA CITY — Iowa men’s basketball has lost back-to-back games for the first time in the Ben McCollum era, but it’s not the first time the Hawkeye head coach has coached through small skids.

Iowa’s losses to Minnesota and No. 13 Illinois dropped the Hawkeyes out of the AP Top 25 poll, and puts the team in a precarious situation heading into a road game against No. 5 Purdue on Wednesday night.

The Hawkeyes have been close to pulling off close comebacks and upsetting top 25 teams before, nearly doing so against the Fighting Illini on Sunday and against No. 2 Iowa State back in December. They just haven’t crossed the line between “so close” and “completed.”

“I think getting close is great because that shows that you have enough fight and you're good enough to be able to stay in those kind of games,” McCollum said Tuesday. “But to win them is where you have to ... be the one who does all the tiny little things that just take a little more effort.”

McCollum had a saying at Drake previously: Death by a thousand paper cuts. It is about doing the small things that separates a team from a close loss to a Quad 1 win.

Iowa hasn’t notched its first Quad 1 win of the season yet, based on the updated KenPom rankings. It has, however, a combined 12-1 record against Quad 2, 3 and 4 opponents — which is where the Hawkeyes should find themselves.

It’s going to take 1,000 paper cuts — or maybe even more — to beat No. 5 Purdue on the road. The Boilermakers haven’t lost a conference game this season, with its only loss of the years coming against the Cyclones.

Purdue has four players averaging double figures a game — all four are in the starting lineup. That includes senior point guard Braden Smith, who could be compared to Iowa guard Bennett Stirtz, but McCollum doesn’t see much similarity between them.

McCollum does, however, know that Purdue is as good as it’s looked on paper through the first two months of the regular season.

“They've got the kind of perfect pieces,” he said. “They're just built so well, and they're so well coached offensively. You've got your primary playmaker, but a lot of it's designed through their plays, through their actions, and they've got a lot of them.”

When the Iowa head coach was at Drake, the Bulldogs suffered two straight losses by a combined 11 points. The program then lost only two more games the entire year, including the season-ending loss in the NCAA Tournament.

The learning curve of mid-major to the Big Ten certainly plays a factor in this year’s two-game-skid-or-bounce-back story, sure. Purdue is currently second in the Big Ten for a reason, and it’s proved why against many conference foes already.

Does it make Iowa’s task impossible? Nothing’s impossible in college athletics. But if the McCollum-led Hawkeyes want to repeat what happened at Drake, it’s clear what Iowa needs to do.

A faster start, make the simple buckets — and play death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts basketball.

“That's what teams that have experienced and have learned how to win those big games do,” McCollum said. “Or they just have an elite amount of talent. Which we've got talent, we're probably not like the elite talent, and so we need to make sure that we do all the little things.”

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