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Ben McCollum says he plans to continue to schedule aggressively in the future.
Near the end of his media day press conference on Oct. 12, Iowa men’s basketball coach Ben McCollum was asked about his scheduling approach.
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It’s safe to say the Hawkeyes are playing one of their most-challenging non-conference slates in years, and McCollum’s answer was simple.
“If you want to be a real program, that’s what you’re going to have to do,” he said.
There’s no question that there’s a lot of difficult games on this 2027 schedule, but which games are the hardest? Which games are the easiest? It’s not easy to find that answer in the month of October, but we’re going to break this schedule down via the system that everyone loves to hate – the NCAA Evaluation Tool, better known as the NET rankings.
Quadrant 4 is considered the worst level in the NET, so that’s where we’ll start with the worst teams on Iowa’s schedule. From there, we’ll go all the way down to Quadrant 1 – the toughest.
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Here we go.
Quadrant 4: The easiest
Games: Lipscomb on Nov. 3, Eastern Illinois on Nov. 6, UMBC on Nov. 24, Prairie View A&M on Nov. 28, Western Illinois on Dec. 13, Bethune-Cookman on Dec. 17, South Dakota on Dec. 29
There’s really not much else to say here. Like the real Quadrant 4 system the NET rankings use, Iowa’s easiest games are going to be the buy games – where the Hawkeyes pay a team from a lower-tier mid-major conference to come to Carver-Hawkeye Arena. If Iowa has any trouble taking care of business in these games, it’s going to be a long season.
Quadrant 3: The worst of the Big Ten
Games: @ Rutgers on Jan. 12, Penn State on Jan. 23, Oregon on Feb. 10, @ Northwestern on Feb. 13, Washington on March 2
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It’s very hard to declare who could among the worst teams in the Big Ten every year, because the league is always very competitive. Every team is capable of winning games on any given night, but if I had to pick the five “easiest” Big Ten games on Iowa’s schedule, it would…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/breaking-down-iowa-mens-basketballs-163032828.html
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Publish date : 2026-10-14 16:30:00
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