Big Ten Championship And Rose Bowl At Stake Next Week

In the long run, the worst part of today turned out to be the injury to Ricky Stanzi. He appears done for the regular season. The dreaded high-ankle sprain has struck again. Talk about a  nemisis. Might as well be global warming or El Nino. In any case, this one particular kind of injury bug has turned into a monster and eaten Iowa’s offense for lunch this year.

Sure, the loss today hurt. But in actuality, it didn’t put Iowa in much of a different spot with regard to the Rose Bowl. With Ohio State’s huge win on the road at Penn State, the Bucks were going to be in a position where a win over the Hawks would have given them the tie for the conference lead at one loss each and they would have had the tiebreaker. So the Hawks were going to be forced to win in “The Shoe” anyway if they wanted to go to the Rose Bowl.

Now, despite today’s disappointment, nothing has changed. If they win next week, the Hawks are the Big Ten Champs and Rose Bowl bound. Even with a loss to Minnesota, Iowa would share the conference crown with Ohio State and Penn State with two losses each. Head to head wins over both would guarantee them the Rose Bowl.

Honestly, with Alabama winning, it really looks as if Iowa was not going to play it’s way into the BCS National Championship Game even if they went undefeated. So the fact is, Iowa needs to look forward, figure things out offensively and go in and stun the Buckeyes. Ohio State is ripe for an upset in a sandwich game between road dates at Penn State and Michigan. And Iowa CAN take advantage and win with a little bit better gameplan and the turnover  magic that they have had all year until last week.

Other thoughts….

*So, for everybody who was calling for Ricky Stanzi to be pulled in the third quarter last week…..how’d Vandenberg work out for you today?

*Did Ken O’Keefe’s playcalling cost Iowa the game? No. But it did not help. NW was a step ahead of him all day. It happens. But for some reason it seems more often than not against the Wildcats. Seriously, Iowa has just 34 points in the last 3 games against them in Iowa City. That, in itself is pathetic when you consider that other teams walk all over NW.  Pat Fitgerald has O’keefe completely and totally figured out.

Vandberg not withstanding, the Cats had Iowa stuck cold through the last three quarters. Northwestern stacked the box a number of times in quarters two and three. Then with Iowa’s running game rapidly becoming non-existent, NW decided they didn’t have to stack the box and they dropped 8 into coverage.  There were simply not many open recievers. Not many quarterbacks can complete passes into triple coverage.

Curiously, the tight-end seems to have become a memory in Iowa’s play calling. That needs to change. And so does the focus of the passing game. Each of the last two weeks, Iowa’s running backs have been open out of the backfield time and again for short passes. Both Stanzi and Vandenberg seem too focused on throwing downfield. Look, I like a nice long pass now and again. But you have to take what the defense gives you. Iowa needs a gameplan next week that focuses on the Moeaki, Reisner, and Wegher first.

I don’t really begrudge O’keefe considering the whole game changed with Stanzi’s injury. But I guess I do think that he wasn’t helping much either. Most frustrating is the fact that Ken seems to have a really tough time figuring out what he wants to do. I mean if you are supposed to be an elite football team, you should be able to get a play call in before there are only 10 seconds on the clock. And a redshirt freshman in his first game action ever in such a huge spot requires that the coaches help him out a little bit. But the play call routinely comes in late from this staff. It’s been a strange problem all year and you knew that sooner or later it would catch up to them. Today, it cost them a timeout and any semblance of rythym on a number of occasions.

*Iowa is still in line for an elite Bowl Game. Regardless of Columbus, if Iowa can get things going enough to get by Minnesota in two weeks, they will either be in line for the Capitol One Bowl (if tied with Penn State for second) or possibly still an at-large bid to a BCS game. Iowa’s fan following will help. And a two-loss Iowa will still be as (if not more) attractive than a number of other choices that the BCS Bowls could make. We’ll break that down more later this week. But suffice to say for now, that a big-time destination is still somewhere in the cards for Iowa. And with six weeks to get people healthy, we may get a full cast of characters back to help take down one of the monster teams that awaits. 

Simply put, there’s still a lot of fun left to be had. Flush this and move forward. There’s too much left to play for.