IOWA CITY — The Iowa Hawkeyes have a "24-Hour Rule": players get one day to react to a game before it's time to move on to the next week of the season. Win or lose, celebrating or mourning — one day, and that's it.
"[Losing] sucks, right?" starting quarterback Cade McNamara said Tuesday. "24 hours. After that, we have to move on and focus on the next week."
For Iowa, coming off a cold, wet 31-0 drubbing at the hands of Penn State in Happy Valley, that 24-hour rule is how the program keeps one loss from becoming two (or more).
"Losses tend to linger," head coach Kirk Ferentz said. "We took one. You have to move past it, because what you can't do is let it impede what's going to happen this week."
"We're going to use that [defeat] as an opportunity to learn and grow," center Logan Jones said. "Every once in a while, everybody's gonna get punched in the face. It's just how you respond to it."
And yet — even as the team's focus shifts forward on schedule to its Week 5 opponent, Michigan State, questions about the Hawkeyes' still-anemic passing game linger.
Statistically, it's grim out there for McNamara and crew: 34 targets for wide receivers (according to Iowa's official stats) and 14 catches. For the year. Meanwhile, there are 153 FBS wide receivers who have more catches by themselves, according to PFF (premium link).
"Part of that is, the ball does go where it goes," Ferentz said. "As a staff, something we're doing weekly is trying to figure out what's the best way we can improve production offensively, and getting receivers involved probably makes some sense as we move forward."
With the offense still struggling to engage and use its wide receivers productively, it can be easy to let frustration set in, especially at a position like wideout that depends so heavily on factors outside the receiver's control — pass protection, coverage, the quarterback's reads and decisions, etc.
Rather than let that frustration take hold, sixth-year senior wideout Nico Ragaini said he focuses on what he can control.
"I don't really think much about what the other guys are doing, because they're focused on themselves as well," Ragaini said Tuesday. "And once you start thinking about [teammates] and what they could have done better, that's how things just go down the drain."
McNamara was similarly reticent about the performance of players and coaches around him:
Ferentz did mention that the coaching staff hadn't done a good enough job with game prep prior to Penn State, but offered little in the way of specifics.
"We [coaches] get judged on performance, and how the players perform; it's our job to get them ready," Ferentz said. "Clearly, Saturday we were not competitive compared to Penn State. It was just a thorough beating, quite frankly."
There's sparse respite awaiting the Hawkeyes in October, with four more Big Ten foes on the docket before a bye week to close the month out. Michigan State, Purdue, Wisconsin and Minnesota may not be Top-10 material nationally, but Iowa has had mixed-at-best success against those first three teams* since its fabled 12-0 regular season of 2015.
*Yes, Floyd of Rosedale hasn't graced the Minnesota trophy room since before AirPods were invented, but that belies the competitiveness of the series; six of Iowa's eight victories over the Gophers in that winning streak have been by one-possession margins.
"Good quarterback [Noah Kim]," linebacker Jay Higgins said of the Spartans, Iowa's opponent on Saturday. "[Nathan Carter] is a good running back as well. I mean, just your typical Big Ten team: good running back, good tight ends, good offensive line. I mean, I feel like I can say that about any team we play in this conference."
"They're another Big Ten team that's athletic," Ragaini said. "And if we don't play the way that we're supposed to play, then we can lose. But if we play the way that we think and know we can play, and play our best, then we'll win the game."
Still, with Michigan State sitting at 2-2 and reeling amid a coaching crisis, the expectation will be for Iowa (currently an 11-point favorite) to get back in the win column. A victory Saturday likely won't quiet the 69,000+ critics in the Kinnick Stadium crowd — there's no "24-hour rule" for fans, after all — but it will be a reminder that the season's still young, and one loss at a powerhouse foe is just that: one loss.
"It's a long season, and when you're playing in the Big Ten, it feels even longer," Higgins said. "So plenty more games, plenty more opportunities to show what we can do."
"This isn't even close to the finished product," McNamara said. "I mean, there's a reason why you play 12 games in a season. There's a reason why there's four quarters in the game for us. If we just shut it down right now, based on what has already happened, I think that's just not a good mindset."
