Something has been quite off with the Iowa offense over the past two years, and it’s quite easy to see.
Of course, Iowa’s offense as a whole has suffered a down two years now under offensive coordinator Brian Ferentz. In the past two seasons, the Hawkeyes have averaged 23.4 points per game and most recently an abysmal 17.7 points per game.
While the Hawkeyes are never going to be mistaken for a Big 12 squad with an air-it-out offense, it is a mistake to assume that the offense has always been this pedestrian. Three times since 2015 Kirk Ferentz’s squad has averaged over 30 points per game, most recently in 2020. Something has changed, and it certainly isn’t the team’s philosophy when it comes to moving the football.
“I’m going to approach my job the same way I’ve approached it the last 11 seasons. My job is to help us win football games,” offensive coordinator Brian Ferentz said in his recent press conference. “We have a tried and true method, we know how we win, we know who we are. My job is to make sure we play to those strengths and on Saturday, we’re winning games, not losing them.”
The idea at Iowa is still the same as it ever was: run the football and demoralize the opposition. Unfortunately, the past two years have seen the Hawkeyes struggle to run the football. Like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar if he suddenly wasn’t able to hit his signature sky hook, the Hawkeyes have simply been unable to play the way they want to. To Ferentz, that inability to run the football is what will lose you games.
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“I think for anyone to have success, you have to run the football. I think the game is pretty simple in that you need to block and you need to tackle.”
To get Iowa’s offense back on track, it’s going to all start up front. Iowa needs a committed team effort to run the football.
“When we’re running the ball effectively, I don’t care what the year is, the offensive line is a big part of that. It’s a team effort, too. Are we in the right play? That starts with me, then it goes to the quarterback. Are we blocking the right guys? That’s important. We need the offensive line playing well, we need the tight ends playing well, we need the receivers blocking on the perimeter.
“We need to make sure we’re exchanging the ball at the right depth, we need to make sure we’re on the right track. If we get guys into space, we’re out there, and we have 11 guys. I figure that if we’re optioning, we can block more than nine, but for the most part, we’re going to be able to block more than nine guys however we choose to do it. At some point, we’re going to have the ballcarrier on someone even if we block everything perfectly. What is he doing with it? I bring that up, if you want to look backwards, which I prefer not to, but 2020, I think it was a team effort,” Ferentz said.
In a pivotal season for the Hawkeyes, with the fanbase extremely restless given the current state of the team, we’ll see if a return to the old style of Iowa football can yield better results for this current Hawkeyes team.
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