Ben McCollum shuts down reports linking him to other jobs after leading Iowa to Elite 8 in first season

Ben McCollum isn’t going anywhere.

The Iowa head coach shut down any reports of him taking a different high-profile job opening this offseason on Friday, one day before the Hawkeyes are set to play in their first Elite Eight in decades. 

“Yeah, those are all lies,” McCollum said in Houston, laughing.

“The only person that would ever know [about my plans] would be, well, three people, would be my athletic director, my wife, and that’s about it. I guess two people.”

It’s easy to see why McCollum would be a target for a top program with a coaching vacancy this cycle. He was hired to replace Fran McCaffery in Iowa City last summer, and he’s already led the Hawkeyes to the Elite Eight after massive NCAA tournament wins over No. 1 Florida and No. 4 Nebraska. Iowa hasn’t been to the Elite Eight since the late 1980s.

He’s had plenty of success elsewhere, too, with a remarkable and rare coaching path. McCollum spent more than a decade at Northwest Missouri State, where he won four Division II national titles. He then led Drake to an NCAA tournament and a win in his one season with the Bulldogs before taking the Iowa job. In total, McCollum holds a 450-107 overall record as a head coach.

McCollum was also born in Iowa city, to add to his ties to the area. He signed a six-year deal that will keep him with the Hawkeyes through the 2030-31 campaign.

Iowa and Illinois will square off on Saturday night with a spot in the Final Four on the line. Iowa hasn’t been to one of those since 1980, when Lute Olson was still running the program.

McCollum admitted his path to a Power Four school has been like a “dream” in some ways, which is easy to see when looking at his résumé on paper. And, especially in today’s college basketball, there’s no guarantee that McCollum will be in Iowa City forever, let alone through the end of his contract. 

But at least for now, he sounds committed to building the program back up and returning for another season regardless of how Saturday night goes.

“We won enough just by kind of that process focus of trying to make kids better,” McCollum said of his time at Northwest Missouri State. “Then I think it was just the call to move forward to Drake, and then obviously to Iowa after that. But it has been a lot. 

“It's been two years of — from the outside looking in, it probably seems like the dream, and it is a little bit. But it's probably a lot harder than you think just because you miss so much from a family perspective … From a basketball perspective, it's been awesome, it's been fun, it's been challenging. I've come out of my comfort zone. I had my butt kicked a few times this year. Hadn't happened in a while. So it's been good.”