This isn’t a renovation, it’s a whole new ballgame for Iowa Hawkeyes men’s hoops

Quick, name three players on the Iowa men’s basketball team.

If you can’t, you are not alone. Carver-Hawkeye Arena doesn’t have revolving doors, but it sure felt like the Hawkeyes men’s program had one last spring.

The Hawkeyes are Exhibit A in the still-new world of college sports. With the NCAA rule of sitting out a season of competition after transferring now fully in the rearview mirror, college basketball is a Greyhound bus terminal for tall, young adults. Nearly 2,700 players were in the portal when it closed on April 22.

Town to town, station to station, as the tires keep turning and the rubber keeps burning. Especially when there’s a coaching change.

Fran McCaffery was dismissed as Iowa’s coach last March and Drake’s Ben McCollum replaced him. Soon after McCaffery was gone, so was almost every trace of his program.

Just 2 percent of Iowa’s scoring from the 2024-25 season stayed, the 46 points scored in 10 games by freshman scholarship player Cooper Koch and the 11 by walk-on Jacob Koch. They aren’t related, by the way. At least they knew each other while a dozen new teammates started arriving.

Six followed McCollum from Drake. Six came from other universities or are fresh out of high school.

Meanwhile, the other scholarship players from last season’s Hawkeyes who had eligibility remaining transferred to The Citadel, Nebraska, Santa Clara, Siena, TCU, UNLV and Utah. The two best — Josh Dix and Owen Freeman — went to 23rd-ranked Creighton.

Now, November has arrived. The five-month college season starts Monday in most places, Tuesday for the Iowa men when they host Robert Morris.

One of the three Hawkeyes you may soon be able to name the quickest is forward Alvaro Folgueiras. Coincidentally, ironically, or both, he was the Horizon League’s Player of the Year last season at Robert Morris.

Folgueiras is a passionate player who may become the fans’ favorite. Or it will be point guard Bennett Stirtz, the Missouri Valley Conference’s Player of the Year last season at Drake.

If you didn’t watch Stirtz’s excellence in his one year as a Bulldog after two at Northwest Missouri State, you’ll see plenty of him this winter. He led all of Division I in minutes played per game with 39.2.

Drake was 5-0 in overtime games. Stirtz played every second of each of them. He had 200 assists and averaged 19 points in one of the nation’s most-deliberate offenses.

After thinking it over, sorry, Alvaro. Stirtz will be Iowa fans’ No. 1 go-to guy.

In another note showing how transitory college basketball rosters have become, Stirtz is one of three players on the preseason All-Big Ten team who played in other conferences last season.

By comparison, the Iowa women’s team is a collection of household names and faces in this state. Six players from Jan Jensen’s rotation are back. Kylie Feuerbach, Taylor McCabe and Hannah Stuelke are in their fifth, fourth and fourth seasons in Iowa’s program, respectively.

That gives the Hawkeyes stability and a public identity that has become elusive in the women’s college game as well as the men’s.

Even a guard making her Iowa debut Monday against Southern University is someone Hawkeye fans feel they know and love. Addie Deal, is a 5-star recruit out of Irvine, Calif., who committed to Iowa in March 2024.

After Iowa sported future WNBA guards the last five years in Caitlin Clark, Kate Martin and Lucy Olsen, in comes Deal.

Iowa led the nation in scoring in 2022-23 and 2023-24 and had 104 points in its exhibition win over Ashland on Thursday. There is a winning, entertaining template in place. The prerequisite is talent. Deal and sophomore center Ava Heiden could help the Hawkeyes’ seniors to more glory days before they’re done.

As for the men, if everyone around here knows who they are by March it probably would mean Year 1 under McCollum was a good one.

If the Hawkeyes have a record with a slight resemblance to McCollum’s last 10 teams (27-6, 35-1, 27-4, 38-0, 31-1, 28-2, 34-5, 31-3, 29-5 and 31-4, with 10 first-place conference finishes), the players will go from unknowns to celebrities here before the Iowa winter is over.

Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com