To engineer an upset as a 22-point underdog in the Big Ten Championship Game, a lot of things needed to go right for the 16th-ranked Iowa Hawkeyes against the 2nd-ranked Michigan Wolverines. Iowa might not have needed to play a perfect game, but... it had to be pretty close.
Unfortunately, Iowa was anything but perfect, and Michigan took advantage of Iowa's miscues to slowly and methodically grind out a 26-0 victory over the Hawkeyes. The Wolverines improved to 13-0, won their third consecutive Big Ten championship, and secured a spot in the College Football Playoff. Iowa dropped to 10-3 overall and fell to 0-3 in Big Ten Championship Game appearances.
Perhaps the most damning stat was this: Michigan had just two touchdown drives in the game and those drives covered a total of 11 yards. The Iowa defense was generally tremendous on Saturday night, but not even Phil Parker's defenders could do much when Michigan started drives on the cusp of the goal line.
The first Michigan touchdown drive was set up by an 87-yard punt return to the Iowa 5-yard line by shifty Michigan returner Semaj Morgan. Iowa punter Tory Taylor launched the ball 52 yards, but the Iowa gunners both failed to tackle Morgan, who found a seam and hit the sideline before being caught from behind by Koen Entringer, atoning for his missed tackle that sprung Morgan. Two plays later, Blake Corum dove in for a touchdown that put Michigan up 10-0.
The second Michigan touchdown drive was set up by an enormously controversial officiating decision after Iowa was backed up near its own end zone in the third quarter.
Michigan defenders pressured Deacon Hill and the ball came loose from Hill's hands. It was called an incomplete pass live, and the officials also whistled the play dead while the ball was bouncing loose, before it found a Michigan defender.
After a video review, though, the call was changed to a fumble by Hill, recovered by Michigan -- despite the play being whistled dead while the ball was loose. It was a dumbfounding decision but it gave the ball to Michigan at the Iowa 12-yard line; the Michigan drive actually began at the Iowa 6-yard line after an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty was assessed against Brian Ferentz for (correctly) berating the officials after the replay decision was announced.
One play later, Corum again dove into the end zone for a touchdown and a 17-0 Michigan lead.
Unlike the also-controversial video replay decision against Iowa in the Minnesota game earlier this season, this overturned call wasn't the difference between an Iowa win or loss.
Iowa was already down 10-0 before the overturned call, and scarcely a threat to score on offense. A handful of additional calls went against Iowa over the course of the game — on balance, more than against Michigan — and it would be very understandable if Iowa fans (not to mention players and coaches) felt aggrieved by the officials' performance.
That said, Iowa lost this game because of too many self-inflicted mistakes -- and because the offense, rotten all year, once again produced results in line with those rock-bottom expectations.
Consider some of the conditions that Iowa needed to meet in order to have a chance to win this game:
* Force turnovers/avoid turning the ball over.
Iowa forced zero turnovers in the game; the best chance at forcing a turnover came in the third quarter, when an errant JJ McCarthy pass nearly landed directly in Nick Jackson's hands -- with abundant open field ahead of him, no less. Unfortunately, Jackson dropped the ball.
Meanwhile, Iowa turned the ball over three times via three lost fumbles. The second lost fumble came after the video replay referenced above and led to the touchdown that gave Michigan a 17-0 lead. The third came late in the fourth quarter and led to a Michigan field goal to go up 23-0. The first lost fumble was arguably the most costly, because it was also a missed scoring opportunity.
* Capitalize on scoring opportunities.
Iowa had few legitimate scoring opportunities in this game, but one came in the second quarter, after a poor punt by Michigan's Tommy Doman went only 25 yards and set Iowa up at the Michigan 38-yard line. Down 10-0, this drive was a chance for Iowa to cut into Michigan's lead and get a foothold in the game.
Instead, Jaz Patterson fumbled the ball after a short completion on a third-down catch. Michigan recovered and Iowa's scoring threat was snuffed out. Iowa ran just four plays in Michigan territory the remainder of the game.
* Don't give up big plays.
Iowa succeeded in limiting big plays from Michigan's offense -- the longest play by the Wolverines offense all game was a 17-yard run by Donovan Edwards. Iowa did not contain big plays on special teams, though -- Morgan's 87-yard punt return proved to be one of the most pivotal plays in the game and staked Michigan to an early 10-0 lead.
* Win the special teams battle.
If there were big special teams plays in this game, they needed to be made by Iowa for the Hawkeyes to have a chance to win the game. Instead, the biggest special teams play of the game went to Michigan with Morgan's game-breaking punt return. Iowa also had decent returns by Kaden Wetjen wiped out by block in the back penalties and had a potential Tory Taylor coffin-corner punt land in the end zone for a touchback.
Iowa wasn't able to make any big plays happen via special teams in this game and the loss of Cooper DeJean to injury actually seemed to be felt most acutely on special teams, rather than defense. Would DeJean have made the tackle as a gunner on Morgan's 87-yard return? Perhaps. Would DeJean have been able to down a Taylor punt or create a big play in the return game? Maybe. He certainly was able to do so earlier in the season.
The main culprit in Iowa's defeat is obvious, though: the offense. For the second time this season, the Iowa offense was shut out (prior to this season, Iowa had gone 23 years since being shut out in a game) and never truly threatened to score. Iowa ran zero plays in the Michigan red zone and the one potential scoring opportunity did have only made it to the Michigan 30 before Patterson fumbled the ball.
Iowa finished the game with 155 yards of offense, the fourth game this season* where Iowa failed to top 200 yards of offense. The Hawkeyes averaged a sickly 2.8 yards per play and had six three-and-outs, including four in a row in the second quarter.
*Iowa went 1-3 in those games, with the only win coming at Wisconsin.
Deacon Hill finished 18-of-32 for 120 yards as the passing game was reduced almost entirely to checkdowns, screen passes, and short slants or curl routes. Addison Ostrenga led Iowa's pass-catchers with seven receptions for 50 yards. Kaleb Brown finished second with five catches for 34 yards.
There were few (if any) shots to push the ball down the field or stretch the defense, although the offensive line's poor edge protection contributed to the lack of long pass attempts as well. Michigan recorded three sacks and four QB hurries and was effective in harassing and pressuring Hill throughout the game.
Neither Kaleb Johnson nor Leshon Williams were able to gain a foothold in the game running the ball. Williams finished with 25 yards on nine carries (2.8 ypc), and Johnson finished with 14 yards on six carries (2.3 ypc). From a yards-per-carry standpoint, Kaleb Brown was Iowa's most effective runner, with a 5.0 ypc average on a pair of end-around carries — both five-yard gains, as a matter of fact.
In the end, this was the same sad, ineffective, maddeningly conservative Iowa offense that we watched week in and week out for the 12 games prior to this one.
There was no switch for the offense to flip to become an effective or explosive unit. Brian Ferentz's bag of tricks turned out to be empty and there was nothing up his sleeves to try and surprise. There was just more of the same: the same stale gameplan, the same rote playcalling, and the same mediocre execution of those plays.
Watching the offense fumble through its same tired routines was made even more maddening by the play of the Iowa defense. In other recent games against the Big Ten East's elite, the defense has eventually worn down and been gashed by the opposing offenses. That didn't happen in this game.
Phil Parker's defense gave up zero big plays to Michigan's offense. The defense officially conceded 26 points, but there's a great deal of context needed with that number as well. The two touchdowns were set up by poor plays by the special teams and offense (with an assist from the video replay booth) that left the defense with no realistic ability to prevent a touchdown.
Michigan also had four field goal drives, but only one (a 13-play, 52-yard drive on their opening possession) even covered 30 yards. The Iowa defense was frequently put in difficult situations by the Iowa offense and the Iowa special teams (as well as the officiating crew). The Hawkeye defense limited the damage when it was possible to do so; when Michigan's offense wasn't gifted outstanding field position, McCarthy and the Wolverine offense struggled often to move the ball.
Michigan finished the game with just 213 yards of offense, well below the Wolverines' season average of 394.5 ypg. The Wolverines were only held under 300 yards in two other games (against Penn State and Maryland), and then only barely (287 against PSU, 291 against Maryland). Michigan's 3.3 yards per play average was three yards below its season average, and a full yard worse than the team's previous low (4.3 against Maryland).
The only thing the Iowa defense didn't do was force any turnovers from the Michigan offense. Aside from that, the defense did everything it could to keep the Wolverines in check and give Iowa an opportunity to win the game. Jay Higgins led Iowa with 14 tackles, followed by Sebastian Castro with nine. Iowa also registered four sacks in the game (three in the first half).
On the surface, few 26-0 defeats can be viewed as potentially winnable. This was not a game where Iowa was just a play here or there away from flipping the result and turning a loss into a win. But it's also very weird to have a team with a defense this good coupled with an offense this bad. Iowa has been shut out twice this season -- but still has 10 wins and is likely to be ranked in the next Top 25 poll.
The biggest "what if" of this game -- and this entire season -- is what if Iowa had a mediocre offense instead of the least-effective offense in the nation.
Could a middling-to-mediocre Iowa offense have done enough to help Iowa win this game? Iowa didn't need Mike Leach calling four verts on every other play on Saturday, it only needed an offense that could avoid mistakes and score a few touchdowns so that the defense didn't need to be perfect.
Special teams blunders in this game were key in the early deficit that Iowa found itself in, but a more functional offense might have been able to enable Iowa to make the remainder of the game competitive. Michigan did very little in the first half after those early scores, but Iowa wasn't able to cut into that lead because the offense couldn't even gain first downs, let alone sustain an entire scoring drive.
And with that, the Hawkeyes are still in want of a Big Ten Championship Game win, and will have to be content with 10 wins and the last B1G West division title as bowl season looms.
