Tuesdays with Torbee
Alternative uniform suggestion for the remainder of the Iowa Hawkeye’s 2021 football season: black and fool’s gold.
The Hawkeye’s effort in Madison proved the old adage that “You’re never as bad as you look when you lose” is not necessarily true. We felt there was no way Iowa could be as bad as they looked in a disheartening home loss at Purdue two weeks ago. Surely, the bye week and some soul-searching would result in a stellar effort – win or lose – at Wisconsin.
Nope. If anything, Iowa looks like it has turbocharged its freefall from potential College Football Playoff contender and #2 ranked program in the country to yet another “Gee, maybe we can still make the Outback Bowl” team.
Once again, the offense was putrid. Once again, the defensive line could generate little-to-no pressure. But this week, Iowa added asinine turnovers at inopportune times to the Bingo card of ineptness.
Watching Iowa – which allegedly prides itself on physical play and bully ball – get wrecked on both sides of the line of scrimmage by a 4-3 Wisconsin team is a bitter, bitter pill to swallow. There is no sugarcoating this Halloween debacle; Wisconsin pushed Iowa around like a teenager in a Shrek costume knocking down a 6-year-old fairy princess and stealing her Halloween candy. And then standing over her and laughing.
It’s funny that sports talk blowhard Colin Cowherd said Iowa’s 2015 team – one that was legitimately good and ended the season in the Top 10 – was the “fake ID” of college football. That year’s squad would destroy the 2021 version by at least three touchdowns. If this year’s team was a fake ID, it would be laughed out of every campus bar in the Big 10.
Most maddening of all is that Iowa’s problems are not complicated at all.
Iowa can’t block on offense – either run blocking or protecting the quarterback. I have plenty of criticism to heap on both offensive coordinator Brian Ferentz and quarterback Spencer Petras, but at the end of the day, you could have Bill Walsh calling the plays and Joe Montana slinging the ball, but if your linemen can’t sustain blocks for one or two seconds, you are going to stink. And that is where the Iowa offense is right now.
Unfortunately, these aren't problems that can be fixed by anything other than recruiting, finding transfers who actually can block and painful on-the-job training by your young offensive linemen. The hope is the guys getting destroyed up front now will develop like the young 2000-20001 linemen did before breaking out in 2002. But that seems like wishful thinking at this point.
Regarding the younger Ferentz, as I said last week, Iowa has zero offensive identity – other than being bad at offense, anyway. Ultimately, it is his responsibility to either coach the line up to be able to block at least a little, or try to scheme around this (admittedly crucial) deficiency. He has done neither.
If I were coaching this team, I’d think hard about moving Brian Ferentz back to coaching tight ends only and finding an experienced and veteran offensive coordinator to retool this shambles of an offense.
It is clear this team is not and likely never was a Top 10 squad. Can it find enough wins to be Top 25? Probably, given the remaining slate of games. This team will probably still win eight or nine games and look decent in a few. But it is a long, long way from Big 10 championship contending on both lines and needs a massive influx of talent on the offensive and defensive lines. Iowa better hit the portal hard and keep up the solid momentum in recruiting.
I was also disappointed to hear Kirk Ferentz point to injuries as an excuse for the poor showing in Madison. Yes, not having Riley Moss or Terry Roberts helped the previously shaky Graham Mertz look like a competent Big 10 quarterback for the first time this season. But Wisconsin has a boatload of injured players too and no injury made Ivory Kelly-Martin fumble a basic handoff (after his hands problems this season, I’d be fine never seeing him carry the football again) or Max Cooper “fielding” a punt with his face mask. Iowa likely would have lost the game even without those two unforced and horrendous turnovers, but they at least might have made it competitive. Every team has injured players by late October, and if you can’t be competitive with a team you consider a peer because of them, you aren’t really a peer. It means you are behind in talent acquisition as well as development and depth.
The schedule from the standpoint of playing fantastic defensive teams is about to ease up, and that hopefully will give Iowa a better opportunity to win going forward. It will be interesting to see if tumbling down the rankings and giving up pole position in the race for the Big 10 West hurts morale and leads to more losses or brings about change and improvement. I can see it breaking either way.
Finally, I know this has been a bummer of a column from a football standpoint, much like the game. I did want to mention that as usual, this was one of the best road trips of the year. We caught up with old friends (and even a couple of Hawkeye Report regulars), ate great food and drank way too many fantastic Wisconsin craft beers.
It's easy to get so frustrated with the play of these late teens/early 20s kids that you lose sight of why Big 10 football is so awesome: spending a beautiful fall day in a great college town having a blast watching a game. I’m not trying to get on a soapbox or tell anyone how to react to a couple of gut-wrenching losses. I’m just saying in my senescence, I’ve been able to let fun times with friends supersede bad play by the guys in black and gold. Here’s hoping we can enjoy both that and good football from our Hawks again soon.