Iowa Field Hockey Earns 6-Seed in Big Ten Tournament
Despite spending four weeks ranked #1 in the national polls, Iowa field hockey stumbled a bit near the end of the regular season, losing four of six before righting the ship with an emphatic 7-2 win over #3 Rutgers on Senior Day in Iowa City on Friday. That stumble did not jeopardize their ability to make next weekend's Big Ten Tournament in Ann Arbor, MI -- seven of the Big Ten's nine field hockey schools make the tournament -- but it did send them tumbling down the seed lines a bit.
Iowa finished the year at 4-4 in Big Ten play and earned the No. 6 seed in the Big Ten Tournament. Iowa will face No. 3 seed Maryland on Thursday, November 2 at approximately 5 PM CT. BTN+ will stream the match.
Northwestern won the Big Ten regular season championship with a perfect 8-0 mark in Big Ten action. Rutgers and Maryland earned the No. 2 and 3 seeds with identical 6-2 conference records; the Scarlet Knights had the head-to-head tiebreaker due to a 3-2 win over the Terps earlier in the season.
Iowa ended league play with a 4-4 record, identical to Ohio State (13-5 overall, 4-4 Big Ten) and Penn State (9-7 overall, 4-4 Big Ten). The Hawkeyes fell behind OSU and PSU in tournament seeding, though, due to a pair of 2-1 losses to the Buckeyes and Nittany Lions (part of that four losses in six games stretch).
The bracket is a mixed bag for Iowa. The good news is three of the four teams that beat Iowa during the regular season (Northwestern, Penn State, and Ohio State) are all on the top half of the bracket; at most, Iowa will have to play only one of those teams during the Big Ten Tournament, and only in the tournament final. Iowa also has wins over two of the the other three teams in the bottom half of the bracket (Michigan, Rutgers).
Unfortunately, the one team they don't have a win over is Maryland, who a) handed Iowa its worst loss of the season (a 4-1 drubbing) a little over a week ago and b) is Iowa's first opponent in the Big Ten Tournament. Still, the rematch won't be in College Park like the first game and it's hard to imagine the game going any worse than the first encounter.
The Hawkeyes are certainly more than capable of putting together a good run in the Big Ten Tournament. Their #1 ranking earlier this season was earned on the back of some big wins (mainly then-#1 North Carolina) and they've added to that total over the course of the season (beating then-#5 Louisville and then-#3 Rutgers).
Iowa also has superstar freshman Dionne van Aalsum, the nation's leading scorer with 27 goals so far this season. If the Hawkeyes can put it all together this weekend, they could emerge with their first conference tournament championship since 2019.