Tag: Iowa Football

Big Ten, big ’20s: Iowa football

Iowa football in the 2020s

Mark Hasty is one of the best people I have come to know on #CollegeFootballTwitter. It has been fascinating to be a sportswriter in the Twitter era, having conversations with fans and commentators across the country about the various sports I cover. I learn so much from the people I talk to, even though I never meet them in person. Mark rates high on the list, imparting wise, original, textured thoughts on matters from football to media to religion. He is one of a kind, and I treasure his insights.

Mark wrote a poignant, typically layered column at his current sportswriting home on Hayden Fry, the Iowa icon who died last week at age 90. Make sure you read it.

I asked Mark Hasty, an Iowa football observer of considerable esteem, to size up the program’s next decade. Here is what Mark had to say:

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The biggest question for Iowa football next decade will be how it handles the transition we all know is coming. Kirk Ferentz is a very youthful 64 and under contract through 2026, when he will be 71. It’s unlikely but not impossible he’ll be extended, so all us Iowa fans assume we have seven more seasons of the Captain. The question is “what’s next?”

It’s generally assumed that Ferentz wants his son Brian, who is currently Iowa’s offensive coordinator, to replace him. Many Iowa fans are lukewarm to that prospect, since Iowa under Kirk Ferentz has never been known for offensive prowess. But I think Hawkeye fans should consider the possibility that the elder Ferentz has limited the tools in Iowa’s playbook.

I’ve done extensive research on coaching changes in the Big Ten and I’ve found that continuity of staff is one of the largest factors in maintaining long-term success. Iowa has been a fairly consistent seven- to nine-win football team over the last forty seasons. That is not dominance, but it’s a long history of success. “Evolution, not revolution” would be a good philosophy to follow.

Iowa fans who want more sweeping change should look one state to the west and realize that change won’t automatically turn Iowa in to a 10-win team that fights for the College Football Playoff.

— Mark Hasty

Hayden Fry’s Coaching Tree Spread to South Bend for Decades

When you take a look you find the names of Bob, Mark and Mike Stoops, Bill Snyder, Kirk Ferentz and Bret Bielema along with plenty of others.

You’ll also find a pair of former Notre Dame defensive coordinators that led Notre Dame to their two most-recent national championship game appearances.

Former Iowa head coach, the legendary Hayden Fry died on Tuesday at the age of 90 after battling cancer.

Fry is best known for his 20 years as the head coach at Iowa where he took the Hawkeyes from being a Big Ten doormat to 14 bowl games including three appearances in the Rose Bowl.  Iowa has been back to Pasadena just once since his career ended following the 1998 season.

Notre Dame and Iowa haven’t met on the gridiron since October of 1968 so Fry never went head-to-head coaching against Notre Dame while with Iowa.

What you’ll hear many discuss when Fry is remembered is his flat-out ridiculous coaching tree.

When you take a look you find the names of Bob, Mark and Mike Stoops, Bill Snyder, Kirk Ferentz and Bret Bielema along with plenty of others.

You’ll also find a pair of former Notre Dame defensive coordinators that led Notre Dame to their two most-recent national championship game appearances.

Before getting to Notre Dame as part of Lou Holtz’s staff in 1987, Barry Alvarez was linebackers coach at Iowa for Fry from 1979-86, joining Fry’s staff after a brief but successful run as a head high school coach in Iowa.

Fry is said to have been upset when Alvarez left Iowa to work with Holtz but was even more enraged when Alvarez eventually took the Wisconsin job in 1990 and hired away a couple of Fry’s most valued assistants.

The other name you’ll see on Fry’s coaching tree that will be especially familiar for Notre Dame fans is that of Bob Diaco.

Diaco played for Fry from 1992-95, earning a spot on the All Big Ten second-team as a linebacker in 1995.  He also got his start in coaching as a grad-assistant under Fry in 1996 and ’97.

“Bob Diaco is one of the all-time great leaders I’ve had in 47 years of coaching” Fry said of Diaco in 2013.

Fry died Tuesday at the age of 90.

His career ended with a record of 232-178-6 with stops at SMU and North Texas (State) before landing at Iowa.  Fry was enshrined in the College Football Hall of Fame in 2003.

 

Wisconsin is one part of a sexy Big Ten bowl season

Big Ten bowl thoughts

I’m not going to tell you that the full Big Ten Conference bowl season is great. Michigan State-Wake Forest? ZZZZZZ. Illinois-California? Nap time. Indiana-Tennessee? That’s nice. Penn State, thanks to Wisconsin making the Rose Bowl, gets pushed into the corner to play Memphis, getting the Group of Five assignment Power Five schools hate at bowl season.

However, five of the Big Ten’s nine bowl games are really sexy and very important. The Wisconsin Badgers are just one part of a five-part story. This year, the Big Ten’s better teams all drew high-profile opponents, which lends some snap, crackle and pop to the 2019 bowl season. One could very easily make the argument that in a generally lackluster lineup of 39 bowl games (UCF-Marshall! Appalachian State-UAB! Pittsburgh-Eastern Michigan!), the Big Ten has the best and most interesting matchups, the games a lot of casual sports fans will watch at bowl season.

Oregon. Clemson. Alabama. Auburn. USC. Those five schools have all played for national championships this century. More specifically, they have all played for national titles in the past 15 years. Four of the five (USC being the exception) played for the national title THIS DECADE. Three of those four schools (Oregon being the exception) won a national title this decade.

These are the five opponents for Big Ten teams in the upper-tier bowl games.

Oregon is Wisconsin’s opponent in Pasadena. Clemson faces Ohio State in the Fiesta Bowl playoff semifinal. Alabama returns to the Citrus Bowl — where it began this decade against Michigan State — to play the other Michigan school, Jim Harbaugh’s Wolverines. Auburn gets P.J. Fleck and Minnesota in the Outback Bowl.

A hilarious aspect of the Outback Bowl:

USC is Iowa’s opponent in the Holiday Bowl. A trip to San Diego and a marquee opponent give Hawkeye fans a good reward for their team’s season. We can power-rank these games later on (you can bet that we will), but for now, simply realize that the five best Big Ten bowl games are all showcase events. None of the matchups are dull. Bama might blow out Michigan, but the matchup isn’t a snoozer. Harbaugh versus Saban demands attention… at least the first one and a half quarters.

The Big Ten isn’t going low-profile this bowl season. This is an attractive, dressed-up, high-end football fashion show to close out the 2010s and ring in the new year… and the new decade.

Week 12 Roundup: 5 Things That Matter, Winners, Losers, Overrated, Underrated

The Week 12 college football roundup. The 5 things that matter, winners and losers, overrated and underrated, and what it all means.

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The Week 12 college football roundup. The 5 things that matter, winners and losers, overrated and underrated, and what it all means.

– Contact/Follow @ColFootballNews & @PeteFiutak

College Football Week 12 Roundup

CFN 1-130 Rankings | Bowl Projections
Early Week 13 Line Lookahead
Rankings: AP | USA Today Coaches | FWAA
– CFP Rankings Projection
– Predicting every remaining game, conference race
Quick Thoughts: Big Ten |  SEC

Week 12 Roundup
The Really Big Thing | Most Overrated Thing
Most Underrated Thing | What It All Means

5. Winners & Losers From Week 12

Winner: QB Trevor Lawrence, Clemson

Remember way, way back to the old days of mid-October when Trevor Lawrence was supposedly freelancing, making too many big mistakes, and throwing eight interceptions in his first seven games?

Remember when he was overrated, not worthy of being considered a slam-dunk No. 1 overall NFL prospect, and was regressing in his sophomore year?

Good times.

Yeah … in his last four games he hit close to 80% of his passes and averaged over 12 yards per throw with 13 touchdowns and no interceptions. If that wasn’t enough, he also ran for 130 yards with two touchdowns as Clemson hung up 52 points or more on the board in each of those four games.

Loser: Arizona’s passing game

In recent years, a mediocre day from the Arizona passing attack usually happened because the ground game was going off. The Wildcats only threw for 68 yards against Oregon State back in 2017, but that’s because they ran for 534.

Against Oregon on Saturday, Arizona’s Khalil Tate and Grant Gunnell combined to throw for a season-low 132 yards with no touchdown passes. Worse yet, the 4.4 yards per pass were the fewest by any Arizona team since a 51-13 loss to the Ducks back in 2014.

Winner: RB Najee Harris, Alabama

Alabama’s passing game carried the team, but now with Tua Tagovailoa done for the year, it’ll be up to Harris and the ground game to start doing a whole lot more. Harris has rushed for eight touchdowns in the last four games and caught touchdown passes in each of the last two. He wasn’t needed much in blowouts over Arkansas and Mississippi State – running for 86 and 88 yards, respectively – but he took off for over 100 yards in the other three of the previous five games.

Loser: Georgia Tech’s running game  

Going back to early in the 2009 season in a loss to Miami, Georgia Tech failed to run for 100 yards just three times in a span of 134 games.

It has failed to run for 100 yards twice in the last three weeks.

The program went on a run of 40 straight games going back to 2016 with 100 yards rushing or more. That streak snapped a few weeks ago when Pitt allowed just 86 yards in a 20-10 win. On Saturday, Virginia Tech beat the Yellow Jackets 45-0, allowing just 53 yards on 31 carries.

It was the first time Georgia Tech was held to under 75 yards since Clemson gave up just 71 in the middle of the 2015 season.

Winner: The quarterbacks in the LSU 58-37 win over Ole Miss

Defense, schmefense. In LSU’s wild and crazy win over Ole Miss, Joe Burrow further cemented his Heisman credentials by completing 32-of-42 passes for 489 yards and five scores, and he ran for 26 yards.

Ole Miss freshman QB John Rhys Plumlee came up with 212 yards and four touchdowns … rushing. He also threw for 123 yards with a pick, and Matt Corral threw for 89 yards and a touchdown.

In all, the quarterbacks in the game accounted for 945 yards of total offense.

Loser: Northwestern’s quarterback play

The good news: Northwestern finally won a game again. It rocked a miserable UMass team – with the nation’s worst defense, by far – 45-6.

The bad news: the passing game completed 7-of-13 passes for 76 yards and two picks. Two weeks earlier, the Minutemen gave up 488 passing yards and five touchdowns to Liberty.

Winner: Kent State’s fourth quarter vs. Buffalo

0-60. That’s what Kent State was in its previous 60 games when down by 21 points or more. It was down 27-6 to a Buffalo team looking for its sixth win, bow eligibility, and a big step forward in the MAC East race.

Instead, in the final eight minutes of the game, Kent State scored a touchdown, recovered the onside kick, scored on a 41-yard pass play for a score, blocked a punt, tied the game on a fourth down touchdown pass, and won on the last play of regulation with a 44-yard Matthew Trickett field goal.

Loser: Baylor in the second half vs. Oklahoma

Everything was going so well. Baylor was up 31-10 at halftime, the party was just getting started, and then … Oklahoma score 24 in the second half – 31 unanswered overall – and Baylor suffered a brutal collapse. It couldn’t move the chains at all after halftime – Oklahoma ended up controlling the clock for over 41 minutes.

Winner: Rice

Rice had one win over an FBS program in its previous 31 games going back to September 9th of 2017. It won last year’s season finale against Ole Dominion, and it was competitive through most of the first part of the season despite the 0-9 start, and then … Rice 31, Middle Tennessee 28. The Owls failed to score in the second half, and it got WAY too tight, but it was the program’s first win of the season.

Loser: Duke

Didn’t you used to be Duke? The Blue Devils started the season 4-2 with acceptable losses to Alabama and Pitt, and since then they’ve not only lost four straight, but the offense has gone bye-bye.

They scored 30 or more in five straight games, and 44 total in the last four losses in blowout after blowout. A once sure-thing bowl season is now destined to be a loser, bottoming out in a 49-6 home loss to a Syracuse team that hadn’t won an ACC game.

Week 12 Roundup
The Really Big Thing | Most Overrated Thing
Most Underrated Thing | What It All Means

NEXT: The really big thing was …

Pages: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5

Wisconsin fixed problems against Iowa, but will that beat Minnesota?

Considering the Wisconsin Badgers’ situation relative to the Minnesota Golden Gophers after UW’s win over the Iowa Hawkeyes.

Had the Minnesota Golden Gophers not beaten Penn State and made themselves an even bigger target for the Wisconsin Badgers, we wouldn’t be devoting quite as much time or energy to the task of beating the Gophers on Nov. 30. Yet, one can’t work with events as one wishes they would be. One must deal with events as they actually are. It’s called living in the real world.

Minnesota has made itself more of a problem for Wisconsin. It’s not what UW fans wanted, but it is the reality the Badgers must confront. That will be a very hard game to win. Therefore, it is worth spending some of these November days focusing not just on Nebraska and then Purdue, but on P.J. Fleck and his folks. How will the Badgers go into Minneapolis and come away with Paul Bunyan’s Axe?

Based on Wisconsin’s win over the Iowa Hawkeyes this past Saturday, a number of interesting questions and attached tension points have emerged. The question I will explore in this particular piece is as follows: Can Wisconsin win this game simply by eradicating mistakes, or will the Badgers need to push themselves far beyond their limits?

Yes, the best answer is “both,” but let’s be clear before we continue with this brief piece: Against Ohio State (or, to use a non-Big Ten example, LSU or Clemson), it is obvious that Wisconsin and other second-tier teams in the United States have to play way over their heads and make “value-added” plays to have a real chance to win. Is Minnesota that kind of opponent? I am inclined to say “no,” but my opinion doesn’t matter that much. A reasonable middle ground on this question is that while Minnesota certainly isn’t in Ohio State’s league, the Gophers made Penn State look bad for much of this past Saturday’s game and — had they not fumbled when leading by two scores in the third quarter — could have blown the doors off the Nittany Lions.

Minnesota went from being “a team which beats up on the bottom of the Big Ten” to “a team that is for real” against Penn State. Do we know yet if the Gophers are not merely “for real” and “a team to be taken seriously,” but genuinely ELITE? I don’t think so.

The tricky part for Wisconsin: The Badgers can’t use that lack of knowledge to assume they can win merely by avoiding mistakes against the Gophers. This leads us into the heart of this piece, and one of the most fascinating tension points of the game on Nov. 30 in TCF Bank Stadium:

The Badgers’ offense improved when the dumb penalties ceased. Wisconsin’s offense got out of its own way. Its running game flourished when the Badgers weren’t behind schedule. Two plus two equals four.

However, after the offense got out of its own way, the defense allowed a 75-yard touchdown and endured another one of its fourth-quarter swoons, the previous one being against Illinois. We wrote about the problems in the secondary which have allowed that alarming detail to remain part of this team’s identity in the second half of the season.

Imagine, then, if both the offense and the defense spend a full game not making huge mistakes, with the level of performance we saw from Jack Coan (tolerable, but not spectacular). Is that going to be enough against the Gophers? It’s an interesting query. One could go back and forth on that topic.

The strength of the argument rests with the offensive line. If there aren’t any false-start penalties and Jonathan Taylor gets four or more yards per carry, the Badgers could pound Minnesota’s defensive front and turn this game into the trench warfare battle they want. A game based on the elimination of mistakes could be all Wisconsin needs.

The weakness of this argument is based on the awareness of how much speed Minnesota has, not only in relationship to Iowa but to a Wisconsin team which was outflanked at times by Illinois. Keep in mind that if Jack Coan throws the ball against Minnesota the way he did against Iowa, the Gophers’ closing speed in the secondary might turn Wisconsin catches into incompletions on successful pass breakups. Eliminating bad mistakes from the ledger sheet will put Wisconsin in position to win, but that might not be enough to put UW over the top.

Yes, Wisconsin’s offense fixed its problems versus Iowa, and the team in general took a clear step forward from the previous two games. Yet, will that be enough to beat Minnesota? You don’t have to answer that question right away… and that’s part of the point. Wisconsin will have to wrestle with that question over the next few weeks. This is the reality facing the Badgers, now that the Gophers have made themselves such an obstacle, at least in 2019.

Jack Coan needs to start hitting his spots

An assessment of Wisconsin Badgers quarterback Jack Coan after Saturday’s win over the Iowa Hawkeyes.

Jack Coan wasn’t bad for the Wisconsin Badgers on Saturday against the Iowa Hawkeyes. For the most part, the football went where it needed to go. Coan made enough of the throws he had to make to assist the running game and Jonathan Taylor. Wisconsin needed every one of the 24 points it scored to fend off Iowa and move to 7-2 on the season, keeping alive hopes for a New Year’s Six bowl bid.

Coan was solid. He did what he had to do. That certainly rates as progress after an Ohio State game which quickly went sideways and never got back on track. If Coan can make steady progress in and through the month of November, Wisconsin can beat Minnesota on Nov. 30, the game which looms as the defining moment of this season for the Badgers.

When considering Wisconsin’s checklist against Minnesota — a team which currently stands above the Badgers in the Big Ten pecking order due to their win over Penn State — one thing which has to happen is that Coan has to become a far more accurate quarterback. Explaining this point requires a look back at the Iowa game.

If you go through this contest, you will note that even when Wisconsin hit an intermediate or deep pass, the receiver gained enough separation from an Iowa defender that Coan didn’t have to be letter-perfect with his throw. Whether we are talking about zip, touch, angle, or placement, Coan was not at the height of his powers. He did get the ball there, but that was more a reflection of his receivers’ ability to separate from defenders.

Against Minnesota’s team speed (on a general level) and its secondary (on a more particular level), Coan will likely not have the same large windows to throw to. Margins are likely to be smaller. The Golden Gophers’ closing speed was a problem for Penn State and quarterback Sean Clifford, who was unable to gun the ball into coverage. His throws were often lobbed toward his receivers, and Minnesota was able to pick off multiple passes as a result.

Coan has to look at film of Clifford versus Minnesota (not this week, but certainly during game week in late November) and understand just how important it is that he not float passes into traffic. That is one part of the equation Coan needs to figure out in the coming weeks.

The other part of the puzzle for Coan — if Wisconsin wants to have the best possible chance of beating Minnesota — is that he has to be more precise with his throws. Think of Josh Hader this past season. His regression from 2018 cost the Milwaukee Brewers a division title and the National League Wild Card Game against the eventual World Series champion Washington Nationals. Hader simply didn’t hit his spots often enough. So it was for Coan against Iowa, even though he still made enough important completions to deliver the win.

Go back to the Iowa game and notice all the times Coan completed a short or intermediate pass into the flat or outside the numbers. On several of those occasions, a receiver had to reach up or to the side to gather the ball. This process of extending for the ball — instead of having the ball thrown to the place where the receiver could easily catch the ball in stride — slowed down the receiver’s momentum. A receiver could not make a catch and then quickly turn upfield to either avoid the Iowa defender entirely, or at least make an upward cut to gain five or six more yards after the catch.

Against Minnesota, Jack Coan will need to hit receivers in stride, so that the plays which gained seven yards against Iowa will gain 13 against the Gophers, and plays which gained 20 yards can become 30-yarders. The 30-yarders can turn into 60-yard home runs.

Jack Coan’s imperfect placement wasn’t punished by Iowa. An effective running game and a strong offensive line enabled Wisconsin’s passing game to be more effective, since Iowa was so focused on stopping Jonathan Taylor. Against Minnesota, though, Jack Coan will need to be more precise. It would hit the spot if the Badgers can make the Gophers miserable. Hitting the spot will happen, however, only if Jack Coan hits the spot himself.