When Michigan men’s basketball’s 2025-26 schedule came out, head coach Dusty May and his staff examined all the matchups closely. Not just who they played, but when and where they played their opponents.
The late-season matchup at Iowa on Thursday, March 5, was one that May had circled as a potential problem for his squad. And his intuition was right.
“There’s certain games you’d rather see earlier in this in the slate versus later, because you know certain teams are going to improve exponentially and be really, really tough to play against later in the season,” May said postgame of Iowa. “We knew they wouldn’t be the same team in November, December, that they would be in March. That’s a good basketball team.”
Good losses are a thing, and this was one of them for Iowa – a 71-68 finish in favor of Michigan. In what was their toughest opponent of the season, the Hawkeyes showed up and made it a dogfight all the way until the clock hit triple zeros.
To put things into context, Michigan has been held to a one-score victory or a loss just six times this season, all of which were before the month of February except its five-point loss to then-No. 3 Duke on Feb. 21.
Wins are certainly better than losses in any case scenario. The bigger picture to this is that this same Iowa team is a dark house to any team they face, especially now that its had a full season to gel. It’s been a common theme throughout the season of the Hawkeyes playing to the level of its competition – which can be very good for Big Ten and NCAA Tournament purposes.
It had then-No. 4 Iowa State on the ropes all game long before the Cyclones narrowly pulled off the 66-62 win at Hilton Coliseum on Dec. 11. It hosted a surging then-No. 16 Illinois squad that pulled away late in the 75-69 outing on Jan. 11. Three days later, it went to east-central Indiana to face No. 5 Purdue and forced the Boilermakers to grind out a 79-72 finish.
Iowa’s signature win of the season finally came on Feb. 17 with a 57-52 finish over then-No. 9 Nebraska – a win it desperately needed at the time. It’s next match against then-No. 24 Wisconsin was a tight contest three-fourths of the way before the Hawkeyes’ second half collapse. And then Thursday, where Iowa did nearly everything right and were in position to snag a monster win over the Wolverines had it not been for an abundance of fouls.
There are times where playing to its level of competition has led to some awful losses, including ones to Minnesota, Maryland, and Penn State. Good thing the NCAA Tournament is full of elite teams that played high level basketball all year long.
And although majority of the games highlighted above were losses, the point here is that this Iowa team, one full of players who were playing mid-major ball last season, have held their own against several of the top opponents in the country. And it should be carried over into mid-March.
“[The Iowa players] chose to come here and give me their all,” McCollum said. “That’s what they continue to do, and they’ll continue to do it. So it’s not over because you can see we could be a problem if we make a run.”
