Ben McCollum’s first summer at Iowa comes with another line on an already crowded résumé.
Northwest Missouri State announced July 1 that the Iowa men’s basketball coach will be part of the school’s 2026 M-Club Hall of Fame class, with McCollum joining the 2016-17 Bearcats team in the upcoming induction. He is the only coach in this year’s class.
The ceremony is set for Oct. 30 on Northwest’s campus in Maryville, Mo. The class will also be honored during the Bearcats’ game against Emporia State on Oct.
- With this group, McCollum becomes one of 187 individuals recognized in the university’s history.
McCollum’s Northwest run lasted from 2009-2024, and the numbers tell the story fast. He piled up four NCAA Division II national championships and finished with a 394-91 record. Along the way, he earned nine MIAA Coach of the Year honors and three Clarence “Big House” Gaines National Coach of the Year awards.
He won’t be going into the hall alone. Justin Pitts, the former Bearcats star who became the program’s all-time leading scorer and helped deliver the school’s first Division II national title, is also part of the class.
So is the 2016-17 Northwest team, the one that captured that first-ever Division II championship. That Bearcats group went 35-1, opened the season with 24 straight wins, and didn’t lose until Feb.
- McCollum went on to add three more national titles after that season in 2017, 2019, 2021 and 2022 before spending one season at Drake in 2024-25.
Now at Iowa, McCollum has already made a fast imprint. In his first season, he pushed the Hawkeyes back to the Elite Eight for the first time since 1987 and knocked off reigning champion No.
1 Florida in the Round of 32. After that run, Iowa gave him a contract extension through 2031, and he kept 10 players from last year’s roster heading into the upcoming season.
In Other News...
A Familiar Big Ten Villain Is Back And Iowa Fans Know It
Shawn Eichorst has spent the past several years out of the Big Ten, working as deputy athletic director at Texas since 2018, but his name still carries plenty of baggage around the conference. Before that, he was the Nebraska athletic director, and his tenure there made him a familiar figure to Iowa fans who remember how much of the Cornhuskers' recent run-up and reset was tied to his decisions.
Now he is back in the league as Wisconsin's new athletic director, which is the kind of move that immediately gets attention in this corner of the rivalry map. Iowa and Wisconsin have built a competitive history of their own, with the next season set to bring the 100th meeting between the programs, and the Hawkeyes know Eichorst's arrival only adds another layer to a conference landscape where old grudges tend to linger. [Read more 🡒]
EA Just Reignited Iowas Biggest Respect Debate
EA Sports College Football 27 has put Iowa in a familiar but still debatable spot, handing the Hawkeyes an 80 overall rating and placing them among the better teams in the game. The number is enough to keep Iowa in the national conversation, and it also reflects how the game sees the program right now: sturdy enough to matter, not quite enough to silence the skeptics.
The bigger eyebrow-raiser is where the ratings land on each side of the ball. The offensive number makes some sense if you buy the line, the run game, and a healthy dose of tight end DJ Vonnahme, but the defense coming in lower is where the debate really starts for Hawkeye fans. For a program built so often on defensive consistency, and with Phil Parker's track record in the background, that part of the rating is the one that feels hardest to explain. [Read more 🡒]
Sioux City East Faces Its Biggest Test After Breakout 9-2 Season
Sioux City East is coming off a season that put the rest of Iowa on notice, finishing 9-2 and averaging nearly 35 points a game while looking like a team built to keep climbing. The schedule will bring back plenty of familiar opponents in 2026, and the Black Raiders also have the benefit of a roster that still includes several important pieces on both sides of the ball.
The bigger question is how well they can keep that momentum going after a major departure under center, even with the rest of the group intact and hungry for more. There is enough returning talent to make Sioux City East a real factor again, but the next step will depend on how quickly the offense settles in and whether the program can turn last years breakout into something more enduring. [Read more 🡒]